


Move Over the Ground

by petpluto



Series: We Are Nowhere, And It's Now [2]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Murder, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Murder, Mystery, POV Male Character, Pre-Series, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilly dies. Weevil finds himself drawn to the little blonde best friend, and to a mystery he'd thought had been solved.</p><p>But Veronica has mysteries all her own, and Weevil is determined to figure her out, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Move Over the Ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaqofSpades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/gifts).



> Not mine. No matter how much I want them.
> 
> The title comes from Bright Eyes' song, "We Are Nowhere, And It's Now". Which is also now the name of the series. If you haven't listened to this song and you have any interest in dreary-ish folk music, do it. It's one of my favorite songs off of one of my favorite albums.
> 
> This work would not have been, except JaqofSpades left a comment on the original piece asking for a Weevil perspective. I believe she was looking for a 20,000 word companion piece from Weevil's POV. I laughed because my one shots are usually around 1,000 words, and then set aside a little bit of time to write this. Something like 4 months later, this piece clocks in at a little over 26,000 words. 
> 
> Your welcome.
> 
> And also thank you. Without that little seed, this hugeness would have never come about. Just don't ask me for something from Felix's perspective, because I may crack.
> 
> Basically, what I'm saying is, if you hate this - blame her.

Lilly dies.

Weevil doesn’t find out right away. He goes about his day and night like usual. Gets out of community service, goes back to the barrio, rides with the gang. It isn’t until the next day, when the news is everywhere, when people are trolling his neighborhood searching out his house, that it finally trickles down to him.

It’s kick in the chest. A knife to the gut. Lilly, who was so full of life and fun and love and mischief, now without all of those things. Out of everything in his life, out of everyone in his life, he pretty much assumed she would be the one left untouched. No stray bullets in her neighborhood. No deals gone wrong for her. She was supposed to be safe. It makes the truth feel like a lie; it makes the pain all the more intense.

He goes out, gets trashed. Finds himself at his tattoo shop, and picks out a heart with a banner.

“Have it say ‘Lilly’,” he tells his guy. “Two Ls.”

Lays there and lets the dull buzz of the gun and the pricks of the needle take him away from himself. Puts all the impotent rage and despair aside, and just lets the needle and ink become his entire world. He wishes he had thought of this before, that he had done the work necessary to create an original idea for her memorial. That he hadn’t just walked in and picked out a prefabricated tat. But the second he saw where his bike had taken him, he knew it was what he needed. Something tangible to hold on to.

No one knows. But he’ll always remember. She’s marked him in more ways than he can count, and he can’t imagine letting himself feel this way again.

~~~

He doesn’t go to the wake. He wouldn’t be able to explain what he was doing there, doesn’t want to deal with the disgusted looks, the humiliation of trying to justify his connection with Neptune’s resident princess. He spends his day with Felix, down at Dog Beach. He’s lifted some bottles from the Sac ‘n’ Pac, and they drink and pass back and forth a joint as Felix chatters to Weevil about some slight Thumper got from one of the guys in their neighborhood, one of the guys who has made it clear he would never ride with the gang. Felix is the only person Weevil’s ever met who gets more keyed up the more weed he smokes, and by the end of the tale, he’s waving so enthusiastically he falls over off the small dune. Weevil finds himself laughing, almost falling off too. And then he stops, and gets smacked with a wall of pain.

For a second, he forgot Lilly was dead. Forgot there was someone in this town who did it, who killed her, and who is walking around without a black mark. Forgot that today was the day they were putting her in the ground, that right now is the last time he could have had to look at her, and tomorrow she’ll be gone forever. He rolls over and takes a long drag from the joint, wishes it was something stronger. Wishes he could just check out for a little while. Wishes he could be someone other than Weevil Navarro for a day, an hour, a fucking minute. Someone who didn’t have to listen to some bullshit where an asshole who would have never been invited to join the PCHers anyway wasn’t sniffing around Thumper’s girl, and figure out if that was a great enough offense for some retribution to be administered. Someone who didn’t have to pretend that Lilly was just another stuck up bitch from the 09 zip, who would have never touched him. 

“Dude,” Felix calls up from where he’s still laying on his back in the sand, “what the fuck is the matter with you lately?”

“If I tell you, it goes no farther, right?”

“Man, Weevil, you know I’m good.” Felix blinks up at him, and Weevil fights back a laugh.

Turns back, and stares at the ocean. “Lilly Kane.”

“What about her?”

He feels the littlest bit of pain radiating from his tattoo. “We - she and I - we had a thing. We were together during one of hers and Echolls’ off periods.”

“Are you shitting me?”

He lets his gaze fall from the ocean to his hands. “Nope. Anyway, she went back to that asshole when he snapped, and it wasn’t anything anymore. But -”

Felix is scrambling up the sand again, and reaches for the joint. “Wow. I got nothing.”

He laughs again, drinks some more. “Yeah. It wasn’t anything - she wasn’t going to be with me forever anyway.”

He knows why Felix is the person who gets to hear this, because even drunk as a skunk and high as a kite, he doesn’t do anything but accept what Weevil’s telling him. Doesn’t fuck with him about it; doesn’t say anything that would make him want to drown the guy. Just says, “That fucking sucks man.”

And it’s done. It’s out there. And his and Lilly’s deal isn’t just between him and Lilly anymore. It exists out in the world in someone else now. Of course, it’s the fucking cholo who is stumbling down toward the seagulls in an attempt to drive the birds toward some people down the beach. But its something.

~~~

He finds himself at Logan Echolls’ funeral because his grandmother thinks it’s only proper to pay respects to the kid she spent her time cleaning up after, and he’s the chump who gets roped into taking her. They both go through the receiving line, and he watches as Mr. Echolls barely pays his housekeeper any mind and as Mrs. Echolls grips her hands and thanks her profusely for coming through her tears. He nods at both of them, offers the barest of condolences, and follows her to the back of the room.

They end up against the back wall, because his grandmother doesn’t want to be in the way. Weevil wants to pull her from this place, because being here and not having gone to Lilly’s feels like a cosmic joke. But she stands staunch against leaving until the service is over, and that means he can’t leave until the service is over.

It takes him a longer time than he has a reason for to see Veronica Mars is directly in his line of sight. She looks how he feels, like she’s liable to be sick at any moment, like she feels the loss of Lilly as if it’s an actual physical thing, like she is barely holding it together. There’s a kid sitting near her, and he seems to be trying to engage her attention. She’s paying him the barest of minds.

He looks away from the tiny blonde. She’s never struck him as anything special, and the only thing they have in common is something she wouldn’t believe if he had photographic proof. She probably believed Lilly and Logan were perfectly matched, that Echolls walked on fucking water. Instead, he looks out onto the room and sees there are movie stars everywhere. And each star has a couple of the 09ers hanging around like panting dogs. He grimaces as he looks back to Veronica and sees Mrs. Echolls has slipped over to her row, has slid her arm around the girl. He watches her offer the woman a shaky smile, but her eyes slide away and focus on something behind her friend’s mother. He can’t see what could have captured her attention, but she scowls and then seems to force herself to pay attention to the starlet in front of her. The woman pulls her up, and taps the leg of the kid sitting in her row, and hustles them closer to the front.

He lets his eyes slide close and puffs out some air from between his lips, barely reacting to his grandmother hitting his leg in an effort to get him to behave. He is, as much as he’s capable of. He rubs his side against the wall, and listens to the eulogies offered in Echolls’ memory. His father plays at grieving like he’s acting in one of his movies, and Weevil wonders how many people are being taken in by the performance. He knows more about the Echolls’ house than most, and he knows the guy was practically never home and that when he was his grandmother began her days tense and came home wound tighter than a clock. He doesn’t doubt the man feels something, but he reeks of smarm and slides down onto the podium as if his legs can’t hold his weight. His grandmother mutters something he doesn’t quite catch under her breath, and he finds himself trying to see how Lilly’s best friend is reacting.

She’s not. She doesn’t seem to be paying the proceedings any bit of attention. Her body is turned toward an empty spot to her left, and for the first time he finds himself curious about her. 

~~~

The reporters stalk his abuela, looking for information. They harass her when she’s coming home from the Echolls’. When she’s leaving for her job there too. He flies into a rage on the fourth day of their camp out, breaks a camera and the jaw of the guy who’s holding it. Bruises some others for good measure before they flee before him. When he gets arrested, when he feels the cold metal slide around his wrists, he calms.

“What happened, Eli?” It’s Sheriff Mars who asks him, who stares calmly and kindly down into his face as he lays his head on the table.

He huffs. “The roaches, they’re around her all day, every day. They want to know everything about that damn Echolls kid. Made her cry a couple times. And my nieces and nephews, they can’t even go outside anymore. I just - I snapped, man.”

He knows better than to lie to the sheriff. The guy sniffs those out like his dogs sniff out the drugs the Fitzpatricks run. But he has also learned that he doesn’t have to tell him the whole truth for his truth to be accepted. Which is good, because the truth is, he’s pissed for his grandmother. He’s pissed some rich kid gets his head cracked open, and she’s the one who has to handle all the shit that comes along with it. But the whole truth is, the bitterness that claws up his insides has to do more with the fact that no one has come to ask him about Lilly than it does this other thing.

No one knew about him and Lilly. No one knows he knew that spot behind her ear that made her giggle. No one knew about those times she slipped away from him as they lay together, suddenly so distant and so untouchable. No one knows how he knew Veronica Mars was her favorite person in the world, how he knows more of Veronica’s secrets than anyone would guess because he heard them spilled from her best friend’s lips.

It isn’t a wound he can’t handle. He knew it was going to happen, him fading into memory, him not even being a footnote in the fabulous and fast life of Lilly Kane. But he was supposed to have more time. Time with her. Time to watch her. He wasn’t supposed to be in her life, so completely, and then not, and then have her die with no one knowing what it means for him. It rips into him that his family’s only known tie is to the jackass who got her, the spoiled punk who laid hands on her, when he knows different.

Sheriff Mars watches him, and he knows not to shift. Shift, and the guy comes with more questions, pokes more, prods more, just looking for a reaction. He doesn’t want to give him one.

“We’ll make sure to have a police car go around your home around the approximate time Mrs. Navarro leaves for work, and again around the approximate time she comes home. But Eli, unless they come onto your property, they have the right to be there. You can’t be attacking the reporters. I understand there are extenuating circumstances, but I’m sorry. With your record -”

“Back to juvie?” 

“Yeah.” There’s something around his eyes now that makes Weevil sit up, take notice.

“While I have you here,” he starts, “I would like to discuss Lilly Kane with you. And your relationship to her.”

“I didn’t have any relationship to her,” he blusters. “Do you not see the tattoos? Do you not see how this shirt is from Wal-Mart and not some fancy place where they sew it with, what, gold threads? Do you not see how my address puts me practically a town away from the 90909 zip code?”

“I do see all of that,” the man agrees. “But I also see some rather interesting correspondence between yourself and Lilly, if you didn’t have any sort of relationship at all.”

The letters he wrote, the e-mails, the bits of poetry and the drawings he dedicated to her appear, fanned out before him. He goes blank.

“Who gave you those?”

The sheriff stares more, this time with a kind of wary compassion. “Some of them were recovered from the Kane residence. Some of them were pulled from Lilly’s e-mail account. And some of them were delivered to us by the school. It seems Lilly felt it was necessary to transfer out of your gym class. You were making her, uh, uncomfortable.”

The room tilts, and he suddenly has a vision of himself in orange, forever doing penance in a jail cell for a crime he didn’t commit, because he hadn’t been able to keep a girl with him. Being the fall guy, because it’s easier to send a hot headed Hispanic from the wrong part of town for the crime of being in love with a girl than it is to actually figure out who the fuck bashed her head in.

“So this is it, huh? You get me for killing her and go back to your regularly scheduled program?”

The sheriff’s head tilts. “Are you confessing?”

He lets out a choked, “No”, and the sheriff smiles.

“Then not at this moment, no. I just need to know as much as I can about Lilly’s last couple of weeks. You apparently know more about some of her activities than others have.”

“Guess your daughter didn’t know about me, huh?” He tries not to be sullen, to not resent it, because Lilly’s dead and it hurts too much to be mad at her about some petty bullshit when he’s still pissed at her for dying with Echolls in the first place.

“No,” he tells Weevil softly. “She didn’t. Which is why your information is so crucial.”

He sniffs, wipes the errant tear from his eye, and nods. “Yeah, well, like you said. It was over. For good, you know? She told me she was done with Echolls, done-done, she said. And then - they were walking the halls together again like we’d never -”

His voice breaks, and he looks down at the table, runs his fingers along the edges. “I mean, you gotta know this. You’ve got all the letters.”

He remembers when she told him she and Echolls were over for good, how she had been resting her head on his shoulder. He’d been playing with her hair, and she just slipped it on out there, that there was no one she could want to be with more in this moment, than him.

“What about your boyfriend?” he’d asked, and she snorted like he’d been trying to be funny.

“Ex. And we’re done.” Her eyes sparkled as she grinned up at him, and the slid into his lap to straddle him. “Logan is just - he’s not what I need. He’s this little boy, you know? He plays at being a rebel, but he’s really flowers and candy hearts. Like Veronica. I don’t want that. I want someone like you.”

He held in the fact that he would love to get her flowers, if he could afford to. But instead, his money goes to his life, because he doesn’t have a trust fund to fall back on. “I can’t really see you parading me down the halls, Mami.”

She let off a peel of laughter that set his heart pumping madly, and she leaned into him close, giddy. “Can you imagine? We should totally do that sometime. Just walk in, like we’ve been doing it for forever. Of course, we have been doing it for a kind of long time now.”

She’d slid his belt off, then, and they’d stopped talking about Echolls and flowers and high school. And then she’d stopped talking to him at all. 

The sheriff is watching him, cheek resting on a closed fist, eyes watchful and empathetic. “Yeah, I do. It looks like there might be some items missing, though, so I thought we could ask you about them.”

“What, you think I made carbon copies? The letters she got, the letters you got, they’re the only ones.”

“How did you feel about Logan Echolls?”

He sighs. “He’s just a punk rich kid who got everything he wanted. I didn’t like him, okay? But I don’t like any of those assholes, and I haven’t killed a one of them yet.”

“But Lilly didn’t go back to any other 09er.” His voice is calm, like they’re discussing tea or the weather, not like he’s suggesting Weevil killed the girl he loved and the guy she decided to be with. “She did go back to Logan.”

“Yeah,” his voice breaks. “And it hurts. But I loved her. I couldn’t do this to her. I wouldn’t kill her.”

“I understand. I just need to ask these last couple of questions, okay?” Weevil nods at him to continue. “Do you think there’s the possibility that Lilly was seeing someone else? Besides you and Logan?”

He can feel the lump in his throat getting harder, and he fights back the tears that seem to want to come. “Yeah. Lilly, she - she’s just this free spirit. You know?” And the sheriff nods, because he does know, because from what Weevil could gather, Lilly was over at Veronica’s every moment she had when Veronica wasn’t over at the Kane’s or the Echolls’. “She just - yeah. I could see it.”

“And Eli, this is just police procedure, okay?” He nods, knows what’s coming. “I’m going to need to know where you were when Lilly and Logan were murdered. I would also like you to voluntarily submit your DNA for analysis. While you’ve been here, we’ve gotten a warrant to search your premise.”

“I was on community service detail, for boosting some rims. You know, I’d been pretty ticked off I’d been nabbed, but it looks like it’s working out for the best for me.” The sheriff smirks at that, and Weevil gives him a shakily cocky grin back. “Now, where’s your cotton swab?”

Sheriff Mars hands him one, and he gently scrapes the inside of his cheek with it. “There. What’s going to happen to me?”

“I’m going to check out your alibi. You’re going to sit tight, and you’re probably going to end up doing some time for breaking that man’s jaw. Alright?”

“Yeah. Just, can I ask?” Sheriff nods at him to continue. “How long have you known, about me and Lilly?”

“This morning. Believe me, Eli, this is nothing more than chance, you being in here for something else when I dropped this on you. If I’d found out day one about you and Lilly, you would have been in here a lot sooner.”

He breathes out, heavy and long, and lets the deputy push and pull him back to the line of cells. He wants to puke, thinking about how his family is being treated like they’re criminals, all because he followed an 09er around and she ended up dead. He wants to puke, and he waits for the sheriff to come back and tell him what he already knows.

~~~

He’s still in juvie when the sheriff is kicked out of office, and he gets dragged in to be reinterviewed by the asshole who replaced him. Lamb was a dick when he was just a deputy, and he hasn’t improved any from what Weevil can tell.

“I already answered all these questions,” he grumbles as the packet of the crap he gave to Lilly is once again in front of him, flung this time instead of gently fanned.

Lamb throws him a self-satisfied smirk that makes Weevil want to take the chair he’s sitting on and give the guy the beat down he deserves. “I went over the tapes, and, uh, I’m not convinced my predecessor was thorough. You tell him you wouldn’t ever hurt the girl, and suddenly that’s it? No. We’re going over the evidence again.”

“My alibi holds. I was nowhere near the Kane house that day.”

The guy shrugs, and his smirk grows bigger. “Well, what can I say? We have to make sure we leave no stone unturned. Wouldn’t want your little girlfriend not getting the justice she deserves because the guy before me was a fuck up, right?” He coughs, and starts reading, “‘Lilly, baby, I can’t wait until I see you again. I can’t wait until I get to hold you close to me.’ Nice. Very romantic. They don’t stay that way though, do they?”

His throat tightens. “I would never hurt her.”

“You’d just stalk her. Maybe crush the skull of the pretty boy rich guy who got her for keeps, huh? Couldn’t stand them together, could you?” He doesn’t say anything, just stares straight ahead. “‘The bruises he left last time won’t be nothing compared to what you’ve got coming if you stay with him.’ Hmm. Sounds like you’re threatening her there, doesn’t it paco?”

“I was warning her,” Weevil explodes. “That asshole roughed her up, and she wouldn’t cop to it. But he bruised her, and she left him. And then she went back. And it wasn’t going to stop. He wasn’t going to stop. Someone was gonna have to make him stop.”

“Good thing he got what was coming to him, huh?” The guy snaps his gum and grins at him again. “You were so in love with her, huh? You know what I think? I think you were jealous. I think you couldn’t stand to see anyone else with her. And you liked making her afraid. You liked making her worry you were going to come after her. You’re scum.”

“Yeah, fine,” he replies, staring at him. “I’m scum. Can I go back to juvie now?”

“What, you’re not enjoying this trip down memory lane? Don’t want to look at the evidence of your devotion?” Lamb sneers, and not for the first time, Weevil wonders how the guy doesn’t get jumped on a regular basis. “Fine, I’ll put you back where you belong.”

~~~

He’s pretty much forgotten about Veronica Mars when he returns to Neptune High. Too busy with the PCHers, too busy trying to keep up in his classes, too busy stalking down the hallways, reestablishing his place in the high school hierarchy to pay her any attention.

Which is why it’s such a surprise to see her tear into a stack of tabloids, shoving the racks holding them to the ground and ripping the paper she can grasp. She’s crying and screaming out nonsense, no real words, and for the first time since he saw her at Echolls’ funeral he really stops and looks at her. She looks horrible, like she hasn’t been sleeping or eating. Like she’s haunted. It takes him a second to decide what to do, because he could easily just slip some ill gotten gains into his pockets and head out, leaving her to whatever consequences await. But he doesn’t. It’s a bit because he can almost hear Lilly, pushing him toward saving her best friend. He can almost see her, and he remembers the time Lilly snuggled down next to him and told him:

“Veronica Mars, man, she’s like, the best person,” when he’d asked her why she would choose the goody two shoes sheriff’s daughter for a best friend.

He remembers snorting, remembers saying that it’s easy to be the best when you’re boring, and Lilly’s look of complete outrage. 

“Veronica is not boring. She wouldn’t be my bestie if she were anything less than awesome, and I’m appalled you can’t see it. She just hides it, you know, behind those knee length skirts and pastel sets. I mean, come on Weevil, even Logan knows she’s a secret badass.”

He’d growled at the mention of Logan, and he still feels the irritation that any mention of the asshole brings on. But he surges forward and tries to grab her. She eludes him, at first, punches him when he’s not expecting it. He’s not expecting it, because she doesn’t even seem to realize she’s done it. He sees the lone guy manning the store cowering before her, and for the first time he thinks he can see the bad ass Lilly swore she is. The next time he swoops toward her, he manages to get a hold of her, wraps her arms around hers. She screeches an impossibly high pitched screech and scratches up his arms, wriggling around and making it all the more difficult to hold onto her. 

All he can think to say to her is “whoa”, and she makes noises like a wounded animal, kicking and squirming. Gets her arms tightly bound in his arms, catches her leg between his own. She starts keening, and he doesn’t know what to do other than to start just talking to her. “Calmado como un venado. Tranquilo como camilo.”

He says it over and over again, as fast as he can. She stills, seems to come back to being who she is. Her fingers, seconds ago drawing blood, relax and grip his arm like he’s the thing keeping her together. And then she bursts into tears, and he’s trying not to panic. She curls into him, presses into him, and he loosens his grip and doesn’t stop whispering to her, telling her that she’s okay, she’s going to be okay. After what feels like an eternity but is probably only over a minute, she gives a shuddering breath and relaxes. Stops crying and gently pulls her leg from where he’s holding it. She doesn’t make a move to leave the circle of his arms, though, and he’s strangely grateful to her for not pulling away. For giving him this moment.

He doesn’t let go of her as the cops pull up, and he swears he can hear her growl at Lamb, who gives an evil sort of grin as he looks around. “Well, Miss Mars, look at the property damage you’ve created.”

He feels her stiffen, feels the tension that has seemingly seeped from her bones rush back in. It doesn’t take a second for him to step up instead, let the shit hit him and not her. “Nah, man,” Weevil tells him. “Little Miss Priss here didn’t do nothing. This was all me.”

He can feel her shift, and he loosens his hold on her enough for her to easily break away. She doesn’t. Just moves and looks up at him like he’s some kind of hero.

He gives the clerk a warning glare, and the guy turns to Lamb. “Yeah, it was him.”

The guy isn’t convinced, wants to see the security tape. He steps up his glare, and practically growls at the guy working the counter.

“Yeah, it’s broken,” he nervously counters. 

And as her grip on his arm relaxes, Weevil’s hold on her waist tightens. Breathes her in. She’s allowing him take care of her in a way Lilly would never, and he wants nothing more than to do right by her, right here and right now, for no other reason than because she’s letting him. Trusting him.

She turns her head to the side, and stares into empty space. And flinches, like something is coming toward them. He doesn’t know if it’s because she realizes who’s holding her, or if it’s for some other reason, but he doesn’t want to have her pull away. So he lets go, nudges her outside of the circle of his arms, and she stumbles a bit as she goes. 

She turns and watches as he’s cuffed, eyes impossibly wide and bright. She’s shaking, a bit, and he watches her as he’s led out to the car. She doesn’t stop staring into him as they load him up, so he doesn’t stop staring at her. He watches her watch him as they pull away, until the store’s windows become blinding from the sun’s glare, until the store itself fades from sight.

“Interesting choice of vandalism,” Lamb cheerily states. “Lilly Kane and Logan Echolls. I think we’re due for another talk about your obsession there, paco.”

It’s sick how gleeful he looks at the prospect of once again dragging Weevil over the coals of his love, and he sighs as he slides further down the seat.

“No two ways about it,” Lamb continues, “you’re still on the list of suspects.”

“Yeah,” he can’t help but reply, “what with me never hurting her before and working off some of those hours I was sentenced to at the time it happened, I can see how I’d be the person of interest in this case. Oh, wait, no.”

“How did our buddy Weevil get those community service hours, Sacks?” Lamb asks, as if he doesn’t know.

Sacks doesn’t seem to pick up on this jibe. He answers it without malice, saying slowly, “I’m pretty sure that one was because he was caught with stolen auto parts. Or, was it from that time he cubed, was it your car or -”

“It was mine,” Lamb cuts in angrily, glaring back at him as Weevil smirks. “It was my car, and he should have gotten more time for it.”

Weevil shrugs. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Cubing a deputy’s car? Why would I do such a thing?”

“Wipe that smile off your face,” Lamb tells him, “because you’re not going to be having a fun time once we get to where we’re going.”

“You’re telling me your hospitality hasn’t improved any? You really should work on that, or else I might consider taking my business elsewhere.”

It’s easy, this back and forth, and he’s able to think about the Sheriff’s daughter while he does it. How she reacted to being touched, touched by him, like he was some kind of lifeline. He looks at the marks on his arm. He gets the feeling he’s not going to be forgetting about her again so easily.

~~~

Lamb holds him for the whole time he can, and he gets another couple of weekends of trash pick up added on to his total of community service hours. But on the whole, he feels like the deal was worth it. And, whenever he starts to sulk and think maybe it wasn’t - whenever his abuela starts muttering about tempers and how hard she prays to the Blessed Virgin to keep him out of trouble - he thinks about that look Mars threw him when he chose to take the fall. It leaves him feeling warm inside, in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

So, he starts watching for her at school. She’s changed. She doesn’t sit with the 09ers anymore. She doesn’t sit with anyone anymore. She’s alone, always. A social pariah. He bristles at the thought of those assholes treating her this way, hassling her for Lilly when Lilly wouldn’t have wanted them to.

But there’s something else about her. People don’t get too close, even as they stare, even as they jeer. No one goes near her. Ever. It’s strange to see, like she’s got some sort of bubble that surrounds her, that prevents people from closing in around her.

There’s also the fact that it looks like she’s talking to herself, all the time, to contend with. Weevil supposes that if there’s no one else, then maybe talking to yourself is the next best thing. But she looks like she’s listening too, and that’s just... There are no words for how that is. No good ones, anyway.

“Hey,” he asks Felix, “what’s up with that chica?”

“Veronica Mars?” Felix asks. “No idea. One day, she stops sitting with the rest of her flock, and then all the shit with the sheriff went down. They mess with her, fuck up her car, and she just takes it.”

“I don’t see anyone near her.”

Felix laughs. “You wouldn’t. It’s fucking weird, man. No one touches her. No one talks to her.”

“Know why?” Felix looks at him, really looks, and stops laughing.

“No. I mean, I don’t pay a mousy blonde any attention, right?”

“But you hear things.”

“Yeah, I hear that she’s fucked up in the head. I hear that she’s a fucking curse. I hear that she’s the fucking killer, and that her sheriff dad covered it up.” Felix shrugs. “But who the fuck knows, man.”

Weevil knows. He knows that a 90 pounds soaking wet girl couldn’t take out Lilly and Echolls, not even if she had the best luck in the world. Not even if she wanted to. He lets his attention drift back to her, sitting there hunched over at one of the brightly colored tables. He can’t imagine her ever wanting to hurt anyone. He can’t imagine she’s capable of feeling that kind of rage, let alone acting on it.

~~~

He hears the news about Koontz as it crackles over the neighborhood radios, watches as the town exhales. It’s the only way he can think of it. One day, the nervous energy in the air is so thick, it makes his skin hum; and the next, it’s like the world goes back to normal, like Lilly wasn’t murdered. Like there’s nothing more to worry about.

They all ignore the fact the town’s polluted. Everyone goes back to playing like this is a place where the surface is the reality. Everyone, except Veronica Mars.

He’s still only watching her from the shadows; feels like the fucking creeper Lamb accused him of being for doing it, too. But the only time he’s ever talked to her is when she was breaking down, and she doesn’t seem the kind who wants a friend. Any friend.

He watches as her scowl deepens, as her eyes scour the hallways. She’s a wraith, and she’s angry, and she doesn’t walk so much as she marches. Everyone else breathed out all the fear and anger, and it looks like she sucked it all into herself.

When she slides into detention one day, he’s not surprised. Well, he is. He’s surprised it’s taken her this long to get to this point. Used to being one thing in this school, and then getting kicked to the bottom of the barrel, he would have expected her to snap long ago. She can’t not care, no matter how much she plays off that she doesn’t. No matter what Felix says, girls like her don’t just give up being one with the 09ers. They get pushed out. And when they fall from the shove, everyone who’s anyone stops and laughs at their folly. He’s seen it happen before. He’ll see it happen again.

She gulps when she sees him, when he nods at her, and he watches her walk jerkily to a seat only a couple over from him. He’s not sure what proper detention type etiquette is, pretty sure she doesn’t know it either, so he lets the silence hang around them for a minute as she gets settled.

He doesn’t know what else to say to her, doesn’t really know what kind of person she is outside the fact she loved Lilly, so when he breaks it, the only thing that comes to mind to say is, “Hear they caught the guy in the Lilly Kane and Logan Echolls case.”

She flushes deep, scowls at him like he’s the asshole, the guy who killed Lilly. “Yeah, it’s all very convenient.” 

Her voice is brittle, and strung out, and he raises an eyebrow at the tone she takes. “Thought you’d be pleased, is all.”

“I’ll be pleased,” she sneers back, crossing her arms over her chest - and he can’t help that his eyes drop to that level when she does it, he can’t, “when I think they’ve got the right guy.”

He looks down at that, surprised. Glances up at her from under his eyelashes, and feels pleasure course through him when she flushes. He watches as she stares at him, and watches her attention shift as the back of his neck breaks out in goosebumps, the way it used to when Lilly would lightly run her fingers up along his skin. He struggles to not get lost in those memories, not with this living enigma of a blonde in front of him. “What, you don’t think Koontz could have done it?”

She doesn’t answer, isn’t even looking at him anymore; but there’s nothing else that could have captured her attention. He thinks about Felix’s assessment, about her being fucked up. But she’s here, and she’s talking to him, and he’s not going to let her float off in her own head as easily as all that. So, he waves at her.

“Hey, you okay?” Her attention snaps back to him, and he’s left a little unsettled by this girl and this thing that she does, whatever this thing that she does is. 

“Yeah,” she tells him, faintly, like she’s saying what she’s saying from rote, like she’s saying what she thinks he wants to hear instead of saying the truth.

“You zoned out there for a minute,” he says, instead of calling her on the lie, and watches as her eyes track something behind him. He can almost feel it, whatever it is she sees, and he gets the oddest sensation along his arms. Almost like the memory of someone holding him. He shudders, and it’s gone.

“I’m not -” she starts to offer in protest, but it’s like she’s not talking to him, like there’s something else happening he’s not privy to. He cocks an eyebrow at her and she blushes, redirects. “Yeah, I do. I did. Sorry.”

“S’okay,” he offers. And then, because he’s sure she hasn’t been, he finds himself saying, “You wanna talk about it?”

Wants to kick himself repeatedly for it, because he doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about her and her problems, even when he really kind of does. He doesn’t want to even think about getting sucked into her life.

But she gives him a grimacing smile and says, “not really”, and he wants nothing more than to figure her out. 

He’s not a dumb guy, no matter what the teachers at this fucking place think. He’s smart enough to run a gang, he’s street smart enough to keep that gang together, and he’s people smart enough to know who he can trust and who he can’t. And when he looks at this girl, when he looks at Veronica Mars, he sees someone holding it together by the thinnest of threads. He wants her to help him help her. He wants to help her, because he can’t figure out how to help anyone else; and he thinks, if he can figure her out, she might let him.

But then she says shit like, “you’re gorgeous” out of fucking left field, and he’s left thinking that maybe she’s gone all the way around the bend already. That there’s no helping her, and all there’s left for him is to get pulled down her rabbit hole too.

He could not respond. He could just ignore her and her crazy; but there’s something about her that makes him feel calm in a way he hasn’t in a long time. So, he thanks her. He’s not sure what else to say but that.

She smiles at him awkwardly. “Sorry. Just thinking out loud.”

Weevil can’t stop himself from asking. “You sure you’re okay?”

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

She says it, and it’s the first time since he’s seen her that she actually looks calm. She looks like the Veronica Mars that used to trail after Lilly, the one he didn’t give any attention to. He looks at her now, and she’s beautiful. “Yeah? Me too.”

He turns away, so she doesn’t catch him staring. Fiddles with his earring, and lets the room descend into peacefulness.

“Why’d you do it?” Her voice is impossibly soft, and he looks up into blue pools of swirling emotion. 

There are a thousand reasons why he did it. Some of them are because of Lilly. Some of them are because he probably would have done it himself, if he’d seen the rags before she did. But the one he offers her is the first truth he had, when he did it. He did it because she needed someone, because she let him, because - 

“Because you were falling apart. Because you didn’t deserve the crap you were going to get, and because I’m used to it already.”

“Thanks.” She looks down, looks away from him, and he’s struck again by how different she is than every other girl he knows.

“No problem.” He pushes his way toward her, bringing his desk, too. “What’re you doing in here, blondie?”

“You know,” she starts, “talking back to a teacher. You?”

The desk scratches along the floor, reverberates through his body, as he drags it closer. “Fighting.”

“They got me in here for a week,” she offers, and he can feel himself grin in response. Five days, alone, with Little Miss Veronica Mars, Mystery Girl. He likes it. He wants to puzzle her out, to see what makes her tick. She’s shown him almost nothing of herself, and he thinks he might already be addicted to knowing. Lilly was right, there’s more to this girl than at first blush; he battles back the pain that swells when he thinks of her, lets the pleasure he gets from her best friend wash over him instead.

“Funny, me too.” He continues his journey forward. She watches him with wary eyes, and then he just stops. Nothing is stopping him. There’s nothing he can see. It’s just a feeling, like he’s hit a wall that’s not there. He thinks about her constant bubble, and gets a shiver.

“Did you know Logan?”

The question comes out of nowhere, and he feels everything in his body seize up at once. “I knew of him. Why?”

She shrugs, and he knows there’s something else there. Something happening beneath the surface. “Just trying to figure out why you’d care about Koontz.”

“Just thought you’d care is all.”

Her eyes narrow at him, and then her attention dissipates. Gets pulled away to something else, to the thoughts in her head. He remembers when Lilly used to slip away from him, when her smile would dim and he would just be holding onto a body. This is nothing like that. Veronica is still in front of him. She’s just not paying attention. He wants to know what it is that pulls her from the world so often.

~~~

Weevil is prepared the next day. No talk of Lilly or Echolls, he’s decided. It’s going to be a day where he sees her, figures out who Veronica Mars is. Maybe get her out of his head. Maybe stop wondering where she goes, if it turns out she’s just an idiot blonde 09er wanna be.

He’s brought his deck of cards, and when she slides in, he shuffles them in front of her. “Care to play? I’m thinking poker.”

“I don’t know how,” she confesses, and he notices her watching his fingers. He does a couple of card tricks, just to track her eyes. 

Hooks a desk with his foot and pulls it to face his own. “Come on over here,” he tells her, sees her flush and grab at her bag strap. “I’ll teach it to you good.”

She wanders over, and slides into the seat, drum rolls the top of her desk with her fingers as she licks her lips. “So, you gonna deal or what?”

“Thought you didn’t know how to play,” he retorts, and she scoffs at him.

“I’m not an idiot. I know the lingo.”

He shows her the hands, flips over some cards, and agrees to her terms of betting strips of paper instead of real money.

She kicks his ass but good once they get going. He thinks he might be getting played in more ways than one, because far from getting her out of his head, she seems to be worming down even deeper. He looks up at the absolute glee she is taking in beating him, and can’t contain the smile that presses out across his face. 

“Damn, girl. It’s like you’ve got a sixth sense. Or some mirrors.”

She matches his smile with one of her own. Says mischievously, “How’s about a ghost?” When he laughs, her smile turns rueful. “No?”

“If you don’t want to tell me your secret, then fine. I won’t go looking.”

She smiles at him, and then at the room, and after a second just says, “C’est la vie.”

He’s gotten pretty used to her randomly saying shit over the last two detentions, to the point where he’s almost worried about his nonreaction more than her actual potential lunacy, so all he does is gather up the cards and shuffle them again before dealing.

“How you holding up, anyway?” 

He thinks he says it pretty nonchalantly until he hears her sputtering on her water. “What?”

“Word is, you were close to Lilly.”

“And Logan,” she adds, and he tamps down on the momentary flare of irritation. “They were my best friends.”

If being best friends with Lilly is something he has to stretch to imagine, figuring out how she could be best friends with an asshole like Echolls is almost impossible. “Yeah. So, how are you handling it all?”

“I’m handling it,” she tells him. “I’ve got friends in weird places.”

She says it like it’s a private joke, and he feels like she’s trying to lead him to her answers by giving him an out of date map. 

“Word is, you’re friendless,” he leads.

“I’ve got enough imaginary friends, don’t you worry.” Her eyes dance at him.

“How imaginary?”

And she scampers off, shuttering completely and throwing on the look of all the preppy girls he loves to leer at, just to watch them shriek and scatter before him. 

“Just this side of real,” she tells him in a voice a half octave higher than her own, breathier than anything he’s ever heard come out of her mouth.

He can’t help but laugh. “You’re a real piece of work, chica. But you’re alright.”

He sees her cheeks turn pink, and she turns her head away from him to hide it. And then she lets out a yelp and almost jumps from her seat, and the wheels in his head start grinding.

He thinks about bubbles. He thinks about brushes he can’t quite feel. Desks that he can’t make himself bring closer. He thinks about her, and her constant talking to nothingness.

He thinks about that map he thinks she has, and the paths he just assumed were done and out of use. And he knows what they say about assuming. “You said something about ghosts.”

It’s funny how quickly she goes white, how quickly she recovers by spitting out, “Just a joke vato.”

He inches closer. “Really now,” he drawls out flatly. “Is it?”

She trembles before him. “No.” She breathes it out, like a confession, like the way he did when he first told the priest he’d taken the Lord’s name in vain, before he stopped confessing those little things because the big things mounted up so quickly. She breathes it out and looks to him for penance.

He just nods. “Alright.”

“That’s it?” She looks startled, relieved, gobsmacked. He smirks at her reaction.

“Pretty girl tells me she sees ghosts, who am I to disagree?”

He watches the blush spread from her cheeks down her neck, feels his body reacting to hers. “You think I’m pretty?”

It’s the innocence that gets him, that makes him take his time as he slides closer, as he memorizes her body. He’s heard that question before, but never like that. The girls that ask him, they usually know. He feels flushed from her reaction to him, groans out, “Oh, yeah”, and watches her duck her head in pleasure.

It just makes him want her more.

~~~

Day three, he gives up on the idea that she’s a passing interest.

He sees her light up when he pushes close to her, when he brushes against her. She still looks away, still scans the room, but he doesn’t want to talk about her ghosts when she’s open to letting him in. 

Before long, he’s sitting on her desk, marveling at how her ducks and blushes aren’t even remotely an act. He’d think she’d never done anything like this before, but he knows about Kane, knows that she was with Lilly’s brother for longer than he cares to remember at this moment. And if he were anything like Lilly, well, he doesn’t want to think about that either.

“Hey,” he gently calls to her as his hand brushes her cheek.

She meets his gaze. “Hey.” She smiles and looks away, but doesn’t turn away. He presses his luck by pressing his lips to hers.

It’s like an explosion. He feels her come alive in his arms, feels her gripping his shoulders and then dropping her hands slowly down to his elbows before dragging them back up again. He feels her lips slide against his, and laps up this mix of sensual hesitance she manages to make irresistible. 

He pulls away first, because he knows if he doesn’t he isn’t going to want to stop at a few closed mouth kisses, and he can’t imagine her following him down that train of thought. She’s not Lilly.

He doesn’t have to remind himself of that a lot, because she’s so different than Lilly. But every so often, it feels like Lilly is pressing into him, like now. Like she’s trying to get him to go faster, farther, with this girl. Like she’s trying to make him lose control. 

And then, when Veronica opens her eyes, the pressure is gone. Like it was never there to begin with. He wouldn’t think anything of it, except he believes her when she tells him she sees ghosts. And he knows what ghosts she would be seeing.

He ignores that, ignores the phantom who might have been in the room. He doesn’t want to talk to Veronica about Lilly, not now. He muddles over that fact, because when he first saw her, that’s all he wanted to do. Instead, he wants to keep focused on Veronica. Only Veronica.

“Turning into a little bit of a rebel, are we?” He teases her as his hands wind their way through her hair, and she blushes as she pushes into him. He doesn’t even think she realizes she’s doing it, like she craves his touch.

“Hey, buddy,” she replies faintly, and he feels himself puff up with pride that he did this to her, that he took her breath away, “you’re the one who came over here.”

“That I did,” he tells her, and resists the urge to kiss her again.

~~~

They get caught making out in detention the next day by Clemmons, and that fact alone is enough to make him want to laugh out loud. He manages to not, and then it fades away completely when he sees the look the vice principal gives his partner in crime. Veronica flushes in the face of his disappointment, and Weevil lets himself have a second of worry over whether or not this thing between them is going to be over before it begins; and then she snakes her arm through his. He’s prepared for the lecture, hopes for more detention; but Clemmons just sets them loose with cans of paint to cover up the graffiti that has taken over the southern wall of the school. Probably, he thinks, to keep Veronica from being in an empty and entirely too private classroom with him.

But she holds his hand as Clemmons leads them; and if he were someone else, he could almost describe his mood as ‘giddy’. So when Clemmons leaves them, he pulls her close, kisses her deep, and only lets her go so he can take off his shirt.

Veronica reaches for him, and he grins at her, basking in the idea that she wants to be near him. Until her fingers catch the sleeve of his shirt, and he sees the look on her face.

“Lilly,” he hears her murmur, and he stares as her eyes fill with tears. “Why do you have Lilly’s name on your arm?”

He can see this falling away, pieces of their short time together scattering before him. He swallows, asks quietly, “You really wanna know?”

“Yes,” she says on the exhale, and he reaches for her to comfort her, to bring her into him. She scurries away from him, and it feels like he’s being cut open from the look in her eyes.

“You really wanna know?” He says it sharply this time, not willing to let himself feel guilty for what they had.

“Yes.” She says it again, and he looks up at her. She’s stiff, resolved. He sighs.

“Lilly and I - we, well, we had some good times together.” He can’t look at her as he says it. Doesn’t want to see the disgust he’s sure is rolling across her face. It’s one thing for the disgraced former 09er to have some stolen kisses with him, he thinks. It’s another for the cream of the crop to willingly be with him.

“I can’t be here,” she tells him, sounding broken, and he turns in time to see her hair fly past him. He wants to follow her, to catch her, to scream at her, to explain it to her. But he can’t. He doesn’t want to fight that fight.

He dips his roller in the paint, and slaps it against the wall. He hopes that she’ll come back to him, that she’ll calm down and let him have this. 

He gets the wall painted, does a second coat. She doesn’t come back.

~~~

Felix is at his house when he gets in from searching for Veronica. He had gone to the house first, because he forgot they had moved. He went to the Sac ‘n’ Pac, and he went to the beach. He even rode by the new office the sheriff had set up, Mars Investigations. Didn’t see her car there, either. He hates that she’s gotten so far under his skin and he knows so little about her.

“Yo,” he hears. “Where the fuck you been? I thought we were hanging after you got out of detention.”

“I been trying to find Veronica Mars,” he answers, pulling off his gloves and flopping onto the couch. “She just up and vanished on me in the middle of detention.”

Felix snorts. “ Why do you care? Just fucking rat her ass out and let it lie.”

“Don’t curse in front of the kids,” Weevil says blandly, and Felix sits up and takes notice.

“Oh, no, man, really? Her?”

He sits up too, matches Felix’s position. “Yeah, her. What of it?”

“There are so many girls out there, man, and that one’s just your past blonde’s shadow.”

“She’s not. She’s something else, Felix, and I don’t know what I’m doing but I know that I need to find her.”

Felix sighs. “I’ll ask around. See if anyone knows where the old Sheriff moved to.”

~~~

He finds the apartment complex Felix has sent him to easily enough. Raps his knuckles against the door a couple of times, and nada. He breaks out his lockpicking set, determined to not be ignored.

He watches her stumble into the living room from his place in the doorjamb after he got the thing open, and she gapes at him and her dog. “I locked that.”

“Yeah, and I unlocked it,” he tells her clearly. He motions to come in, and she crosses her arms and looks obstinate. He sighs.

“What are you doing here?” If she wants the explanation, he thinks, she’s going to have to deal with him coming inside. So he walks into the apartment and flops on the couch. Looks around at the lightly furnished home.

“I wanted to talk to you. You ran away from me this afternoon. After I got finished there, I spent my time tracking you down.” She doesn’t relax, and he thinks maybe he made a mistake finding her. Maybe he should have waited longer before coming to her.

“I’m not that hard to find,” she says snottily, and he wants to wring her neck.

“You moved,” he shoots back.

She glares at him. “You and Lilly?”

He rests his arms on his knees, tilts his head up at her. “Yeah. Me and Lilly. You pissed because you thought she and Echolls were an epic love or something?”

“I’m pissed,” she hisses back, “because I’m just a substitute blonde for a biker she never even told me about.”

He watches her eyes fill with tears, and he just feels so tired and worn out. Worn down. “You’re not a substitute blonde. Not for me.”

She works her jaw. “I don’t believe you.”

“Yeah, I figured as much,” he whispers. Wonders why he ever believed she would give him the chance to explain.

“Then why are you here?” Her voice breaks on the last word, and he wants to take that pain away. Wants to make her see that she’s worth coming here for. Not for Lilly, but for her. That he wants to see what this is, between the two of them. The broken biker and the girl with ghosts.

He tries one more time. “I’m here, because I missed you. I put in my time and I did our job, and you weren’t there to make me laugh. I’m here, because I missed laughing. Don’t you?”

She shakes her head. “I laugh all the time.”

“Right,” Weevil acknowledges. “With your ghosts.”

“Yeah, with my ghosts.” She looks lost, though, like maybe she’s ready for life beyond the ghosts. He stands up.

“Go out with me,” he asks her. “Go out with me, and I’ll prove I’m interested in Veronica Mars, and not looking for someone to be Lilly.”

She looks at him, hard. “How do I know you didn’t kill them?”

He grins at her. “If you thought that, I’m betting your dog would have had me down and his teeth in my throat in a second.”

She looks hard at her dog, and Weevil watches him tilt his head back at her. Watches the dog wag his tail. “Let’s take him for a walk,” she decides, and relief and pleasure and shock course through him.

“Yeah, sure. Just - can I hold your hand?” He feels like this is his first time doing this, his first time going out with a girl. He feels awkward and confused, and he guesses it’s because this is his ex-girl’s best friend, and his ex-girl is still hanging out and around. He doesn’t know what, if anything, the ghost of Lilly is whispering in Veronica’s ear about him. He doesn’t know what, if anything, Veronica believes of those potential whispers.

But he watches Veronica blush, and nod, and gently takes her hand as she takes her dog’s leash. 

“What’s his name?” he asks, nodding toward the pit bull.

“This is Backup,” she tells him. “Backup, meet Weevil.”

The dog barks, and he smiles.

They walk for a while, holding hands, him telling her about the shit he’s pulled on Lamb, her laughing at the shit he’s pulled on Lamb, when he gently tugs her back.

“You ever think about ignoring them, your ghosts? Maybe if you stopped, you know, talking to them, they’d go away.”

She looks frightened at the very idea. “I don’t want them to go away. I need them.”

“Alright.”

He doesn’t know if it is, or if it isn’t, but he isn’t in much of a position to lead her either way on that. He just winds his arm around her shoulders, and listens to her ramble about PI work, how she’s learning how to use the camera, how her father wants her to only be involved in the front end, desk duty, but she’s ready for so much more. He lets her words, her life, wash over him.

~~~

Mrs. Echolls takes a dive off the Coronado Bridge, and just like that, he doesn’t see Veronica for a couple of days. 

She doesn’t explain where she is, or who she’s going to the funeral for. She’s still keeping it a secret who her ghosts are, and he just doesn’t get the whys of it all. Why she doesn’t just come clean. Why they talk about her ghosts without giving them their names. Why she’s so skittish about the whole thing, like she thinks that if she admits to talking to these particular people, he’s going to up and leave her high and dry and call her crazy.

If he hasn’t called her crazy yet, he wants to say, he’s not going to be calling her crazy at all.

He tells himself that if she calls, he’s not going to go running. He tells himself he’s done bending. He tells himself that this isn’t going to be like it was before, that he’s not going to just fall at the feet of another blonde. And then she calls, and he hops on his bike and drives on over.

“Come in,” she calls, not even looking up when he knocks, and he wants to knock some sense into her. But instead he stumbles upon a floor full of x-rays and photos of a beaten kid. It takes him a second to realize that beaten kid is Logan Echolls.

“What the fuck is this?”

She barely glances up from the file she’s looking at. “Logan’s medical files. They came yesterday. His mom sent them to us before she died.” She makes a face. “She had our old address. It took a while for them to find us. I had to sign for it.”

He feels a little nauseous. Feels a little crappy about the amount of shit he’s thought about the spoiled mother fucker over the years. And then, like a flash, he sees the bruises Lilly sported, and he hates the asshole all over again for doing what was done to him to someone else. Someone he claimed to love. “Like father, like son, huh?” 

She cocks her head at him. “Que?”

Weevil grimaces. “Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

She shrugs at him, eyes wide and innocent, and he wants to groan at the injustice of being at the beck and call of this girl. At being the one who has to destroy that innocence by telling unpleasant truths. “Okay, I won’t. But I don’t.”

“He hit Lilly,” he tells Veronica.

“Did Lilly tell you that?” She looks up at him, eyes burning. 

Weevil clenches his fist, unclenches it. “No. But I saw the bruises. He was with her.”

“Logan wouldn’t do that,” she tells him. She looks like she believes it, and he wants to laugh at her naivety. At the idea that the guy she knew wouldn’t have. 

Instead, he just asks, “Yeah? Then who did?”

“Logan wouldn’t have.” She says it like its a universal truth - the sky is blue, the grass is green, Logan wouldn’t hit Lilly.

Weevil smiles a bitter smile. “Just like Lilly would never do me, right?”

It cuts him up to say it, to force her to look at it. To force her to see that the people she knew weren’t always the people she thought they were. It cuts him to make his relationship with Lilly just another point he gets in this. But Veronica refuses to play along. 

“No. My problem with you and Lilly was never the Lilly part. My problem with you and Lilly is the you and me part.” She glares at him as she says it, and it’s like a light turns on. 

“Lilly’s got nothing to do with you,” he tells her seriously, willing her to believe it.

“She has everything to do with me!” Veronica cries. “I’m only here because she’s gone. I am who I am now because Lilly and Logan left me. You’re only paying attention to me now because there’s no more Lilly in the world.”

It hurts, because it might be true. He ignored her before, because Lilly was so blinding. He wonders how many guys did that, if he would have continued doing that. He wants to tell her that it doesn’t matter, that Lilly is dead and she isn’t, and that she shines in a way Lilly never did anyway; but what he does get out is, “You really think that?”

“I know that,” she tells him. “No guys ever looked at me. Ever. The only guy who did was her brother. Think about that. The only guy who ever liked me when she was around was her brother. So, yeah, I find it a bit weird that a guy she slept with, a guy who tattooed her name into his skin, is suddenly thinking I’m hot stuff.”

“Okay. I don’t know what I’m doing here if that’s what you still think.”

She throws Logan’s medical files down, and papers spew out into the small living room. “Don’t you get it?” she spits out at him, fast and heated. “You’re the only person I have, outside of my dad. And that’s why it hurts so much that you’d trade me for her in a second.” Pauses, and then adds just as desperately, “Plus, I need you to help me figure out who did this to them.”

He barely hears what she’s telling him, about him trading her for Lilly, like it’s an option. Like he would ever do that. “Koontz is in jail,” he snarls.

“Abel Koontz didn’t kill Lilly,” she hisses back. “Or Logan. It doesn’t make any sense for why he would. How he would, there.”

He falls back down into the couch as Veronica scoops up the papers, and it feels like she’s cut the lines to his anger. He is worn out and tired, and ready to stop fighting. “What of your ghosts?”

“What about them?” she asks distractedly.

“I’m not the only person you have. You’ve got them.” He waves his hand at the room. He doesn’t know if they’re in here now, but he always imagines one or both of them hanging around. 

She tears up, and he wants to comfort her. “I can’t touch them. And I love them, but - they’re in their own world. Literally. And I can’t get to them. Sometimes, I just need... I need someone here, too.”

Weevil rolls his neck, cricks out all the cracks. “What do they say to you, your ghosts? About what happened to them?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She’s gone white as a sheet, and she clutches the pieces of the guy’s medical history to her chest like she’s going to need a doctor soon herself.

Weevil readjusts on the couch, works to see her better. Stares her down. “Baby, come on. You don’t start acting all crazy until Lilly and Echolls kick the bucket, and then you tell me you’re getting visits from spirits. It isn’t too hard to get two from one and one.” She looks like she’s ready to run, like she’s about to have a heart attack, so he leans forward and grabs her hands. “No te afliges.”

Veronica launches herself at him, buries her face in the crook of his neck. He stiffens, and then holds her tight as she clings to him. He can feel the whisper grace the skin of his neck. “Lo - Logan says they don’t know. They don’t remember. He thinks it may be too traumatic.”

She’s trembling with her admission, and Weevil scoops her up and brings her closer. Holds her to him and wills her to believe in him. “And you’re sure Koontz didn’t do it.”

“My dad doesn’t think he did it,” she offers. “He’s the best in the business. If he thinks there’s some other fish, then there’s some other fish.”

Weevil keeps her cupped in tight with one of his arms, squeezing her leg gently in his hand. He hears her sigh at the contact. Spreads Logan’s file out in front of him with his other hand. “Why did Mrs. Echolls send this here?”

“Dad’s a PI these days,” she reminds him. “Maybe she wanted someone to know, before she died. And who better?”

Weevil meets her blue eyes again, and his tongue slips over her lips. He feels them open against it, and he grins into her mouth. Grins at this thing they’re making for themselves, here. 

“You are the craziest chica I’ve ever had privilege to know,” he whispers against her teeth. “And it has nothing to do with anyone but you.”

It is true, and he hopes he can make her believe it. Even if she weren’t seeing ghosts, this would be true. Veronica Mars. He can hear the way Lilly used to say her name, like it was big and grand and she was big and grand too. All that time in the shadows, and Veronica Mars has more backbone and more drive than anyone else he’s ever known. 

~~~

He starts meeting up with her at school. She tells him Logan doesn’t hang around when he’s around, and that Lilly is always off doing something else, so he figures he’s in the clear. He meets her at her locker, and sees the shit they write about her, write to her, up close. Pulls her to him and breathes in the smell of her hair, wraps his fingers in her shirt.

“Who did that?”

She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a key to the janitor’s closet. I’ll take care of it at lunch.”

It does matter. It matters to him. But then she smiles at him, and kisses him like he matters. Kisses him in the hallway in front of all the people in their school. She kisses him like she cares. When she kisses him, he forgets someone in the school is disrespecting his girl.

“Eat lunch with me,” he tells her. “Come hang out with me and the boys. I’ll make it real good for you.”

He watches the blush spread out on her cheeks, pretty and pink. “Yeah, okay. I think I’d like that.” The bells rings and she gives him one more peck before she turns to go. “I’ve got to get to class.”

He tells the gang to start watching her back, to report in who says what to her, about her. They do, with a bit of grumbling. The grumbling gets a little louder when she shows up at their table, and a little louder still when she stares into space. He knows this isn’t her ghost face, but he’s not sure where she goes when she’s not with them and not with him. He just pulls her onto his lap and ignores the rest of the guys’ complaints.

“You gonna eat your food,” he asks, “or just stab it to death?”

Her eyes slowly come back into focus, and she smiles shyly at him. “I figure, if the fork can’t puncture it, then maybe I don’t need to eat it.”

“If you’re not going to, can I?” Felix is already leaning over the table and grabbing for her tray, and he wants to strangle the guy. But Veronica just shrugs.

“Sure. But if it fights your small intestine and wins, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Felix looks a little confused by where this conversation has gone, and shakes his head before shoving the mystery meat into his mouth.

His days go by like that. He kisses her by her locker, by his bike, in her car. He revels in the ability to touch her where he wants. When he wants. He revels in her want to be touched by him. Chardo tries to talk to him about loca gringas who make leaders look soft, but he just stares him down.

“She’s not crazy. And if she is, that’s her business. Hers and mine. She’s my girl, and that’s it. Got it?”

Chardo nods, looks shaken. “Yeah, Weevil. I got it. I didn’t know you two had anything official.”

It isn’t until Chardo says it that he realizes it’s true. Veronica’s the kind of girl who does official. Veronica’s the kind of girl he expects to have those conversations with, the ones his cousins talk about having. The “what are we” conversation he avoids having with girls on principle. Unless, apparently, those girls are white and blonde. 

Weevil waits for her to bring it up. She doesn’t.

And she doesn’t tell him the shit she gets from the 09ers either. He ignores the words on her car and on her locker. Doesn’t want to overstep. He thinks about Lilly; how when he pressed her for more, she left. He doesn’t want to do that here, and now. Then it finally makes it to his ears what fucking Friedrich said to her, about fucking the PCHers, and he decides he’s waited long enough for her to make the first move.

“Grab him,” he tells Felix. “Grab him, and bring him to the flagpole.”

Felix nods at the order. “He wasn’t the only one messing with her. Fucking Casablancas has been spreading shit too.”

“To her face?”

“Nah,” Felix tells him. “Locker room talk, mostly.”

He nods. “We’ll take care of him later.”

~~~

Weevil waits at the flagpole, and watches the strange and grim procession. His boys aren’t messing around. Most of them don’t like Veronica too much, he knows it. Hears them talk amongst themselves about her. He doesn’t really give a shit, as long as they come through for him when it matters. Like now. Because they might not like Veronica, but she’s his. As long as they’re doing what they’ve been doing in public, she’s his.

Friedrich looks like he’s about to pee himself; and when Weevil jumps down from where he’s been standing at the pole, the guy’s legs buckle. 

“Hear you been saying shit about my girl,” Weevil starts.

Friedrich blanches. “I - I’ll apologize. Tomorrow. I’ll apologize tomorrow. So, there’s no need for physical violence. I’ve learned my lesson.”

Weevil punches him solidly in the gut. He goes down, hard. “Yeah, here’s the thing. An apology is fine and all, if it were someone else’s girl. But you’ve been talking shit about my girl. Making it seem like she’s fine to go after to your 09er buddies.” Friedrich starts crying, big messy tears rolling down his face. Weevil turns to Felix, disgusted. “Can you believe this guy? One fucking punch, and he’s down for the count.”

“Don’t - don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything.”

Weevil smiles. “Ah, now, it’s too late for that.” Picks him up by the collar, punches him again, in the side. “See, when you talk shit about my girl, you’re talking shit about me. And if I let you get away with that, well -” Takes a second to punch him in the face. “- it makes me look soft. And I’m not soft.”

Stands up, nods to the other guys. They pick Friedrich back up off the ground. “How badly do you want him messed up?”

“Fuck him up,” Weevil tells them. “Not enough to put him in the hospital. But enough so that the next couple of hours are going to be mighty uncomfortable when we tape him to the pole.”

Friedrich whimpers. He leans down to the guy. “Listen to me: if anyone fucks with her again, I’m going to blame you. Anyone says anything about her again, and this? Is going to be a joke compared to what I’ll do to you. Nod if you get what I’m telling you.”

He does. 

“Good. Tape him up. I’m going to go and have a nice sit down with some of the others.”

~~~

Getting Casablancas’ surf board is easy. Getting into the 09er lockers is comparatively more difficult, but still doable. Making it clear to all of them that Veronica isn’t to be messed with is worth it. Especially when he comes to school the next day, and watches the chips fall.

No one touches Friedrich. He stays taped to the pole until an administrator comes out to cut him down. He doesn’t say a word about who did it, or why. But everyone knows. Clemmons levels a look at him, specifically, and he gives an innocent face back.

“Eli Navarro,” he says. “My office, now.”

He smirks at Felix and saunters on down the hall. He wonders what Veronica thinks of his present, lets himself imagine her pissed off face as he lowers himself into the chair he sometimes thinks of as his own.

~~~

Days pass by. Veronica doesn’t say anything about the 09ers, and the 09ers stop saying anything at all about Veronica. She looks lighter, though, like a weight she didn’t know she was carrying is gone. Weevil likes to think he helped throw that off.

He silently begs her to talk to him, about anything. About her ghosts. About her family. About whatever the hell it is that haunts her; because even though she’s got ghosts, they’re not doing that. It’s something else, and it is the thing that drags her away from him. It’s the thing that makes her eyes slide away, and makes her face close. 

He follows her eyes one day to the 09er table, and it leaves him more unsettled than anything else. He is desperate to believe what she says, that she never really belonged there - that she was there because of Lilly and Logan and Duncan - that she’s happier now not being there. But she doesn’t look happy. Especially not when she’s staring, calculated, at them all, the rich fucks who get everything they want with almost no effort. Who had her with no effort.

And there’s always still Duncan. Because even though the other two are dead, Kane the wonder boy is still alive and kicking. And still staring at her, even if she’s not paying any attention to that. 

He puts it out of his mind, or tries to, but it just keeps circling back around. It gets worse when she’s not around. When his mind goes to wondering where she is, if she’s with him. If she’s thinking about him. It’s the worst when she is around, but not present. When she’s off in her own head, and not because of her ghosts. When she’s some place he can’t follow, and is too chicken shit to ask about.

Like, he thinks ruefully, right now, with Veronica burrowed into his lap but so far away she could be on the moon.

She’s found him in between classes, and he’d told the rest of the crew to scatter when he saw her winding her way up to him, because they don’t know how to deal with her when she’s here let alone when she’s not. But she missed lunch with him, and he hasn’t seen her since first bell, and he missed her. He’s still missing her. He pushes back some of her long hair, and pushes his face into the crook of her neck.

“Where you been all day?”

“Just, you know, checking some stuff out,” she tells him from far away, and then snaps back into herself. He feels it happen, like every nerve in her body comes to attention when she’s fully in the here and now and with the living. “You see Ms. James, right? When she does those ‘grief sessions’?”

He thinks he could fall in love with this Veronica Mars, the one he doesn’t think anyone else knows about, or ever knew about. The tricksy one, the one who plans intricate plans in seconds. The one who sees the world like a complex battle, and who will use any tool in her arsenal to get the job done.

He thinks it’s dangerous to fall in love with that Veronica Mars, especially when he’s not sure what he is in her bag of tricks. He thinks he probably doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. 

“Yeah. What do you need?”

“Duncan Kane’s file,” she tells him, and he flinches. Figures she’s thinking of Kane when he’s thinking he might be halfway to being in love with her, but that’s his life in a nutshell right there. He can’t help it though, he pulls her closer. Holds her a little tighter.

“Right,” he says shortly. “Duncan Kane. Of course.”

“Yeah,” she responds, and she leans into him, snuggles on down. He’s at a loss to reconcile what she’s asking him for and what she’s doing to him, and it’s making him more irritated than anything else. “I think it’ll answer some questions I have, so -”

“And you think some kisses and some barely second base action means I’m going to help you get info on your ex?” 

The worst part is that he’s not sure if he means that. He’s not sure that if she snapped her fingers for him, he wouldn’t come. He wants to believe he still has his pride, but just a little bit of Veronica has made him hungry for more. And as long as he can keep getting her scraps without having it be something known to the rest of the gang, he might consider doing it. Except, he remembers those days with Lilly, and he doesn’t want to go down that road again.

“What? What are you talking about?” To her credit, she looks surprised, so he lifts her off his lap gently and places her in a nearby chair just as softly as you please.

“Look. I get it. Guy dumps you, and you don’t know why. You’re head over heels, and he’s this moneyed 09er who you can show off and get into the country club with. But don’t treat me like I’m some sort of rube, okay?” His voice crackles a bit, and he is just so tired of blondes and their games. He’s so tired of feeling like he’s standing on sand all the damn time. 

She’s staring at him with thinned lips and fierce eyes, like she’s willing him to believe her. “I don’t want the file for him and me.”

“Really? You don’t still wonder? You don’t still care?” It’s something he keeps coming back to, because if she would just say that she doesn’t, then this part of his life will stop being a roller coaster.

“I do. I wonder, and I care. But this isn’t about that. It’s about Lilly and Logan, and him being there for it. He found them, and Meg says he doesn’t remember - and it just, it feels off.”

Just like that, his world shifts again. This is the thing that haunts her. Of course it is. And she brings to it an angle he would have never considered, before. He’s scared she can consider it. Because she was full in love with Kane, and if she can think he would do that then - he doesn’t know. “You think he hurt Lilly?” 

“Listen, a couple of days after we broke up, I was in the bathroom. And Carrie Bishop and Susan Knight came in, and they were talking about it. Duncan, he got brought to the hospital. He had to be tied down. I mean, this is according to Carrie, grade A bitch, but... I don’t think Duncan would ever hurt Lilly. Not consciously anyway. He loved her too much. But I don’t know why Duncan would have to be strapped to a gurney either. If I could just get that file, maybe I could figure some stuff out.”

“Yeah, alright.” He nuzzles the top of her head. “I have an appointment Thursday. I’ll see what I can do then.”

~~~

Getting the file from Ms. James’ office turns out to be easier than he ever would have expected. All it takes is some ranting and raving about, in no particular order, the juvie system, Lilly’s penchant for getting into trouble, Echolls’ lack of anything resembling appeal, and Veronica, and she’s staring at him as he picks some cutesy thing up and throws it against the far wall. Her entire body flinches and she watches the impact of the doodad as he knocks the files off of her desk for the students.

He slides Kane’s into his jacket, and after half a second decides to grab Veronica’s as well. Kane was there earlier in the day, and he knows for a fact that Veronica skipped her session. If she hadn’t, she would have had a brilliant plan to grab Kane’s file herself instead of foisting that job off on him.

He stays hunched over, so when Ms. James comes over to this side of the desk, it won’t look like he was doing anything except being exactly who she expects him to be - a hot headed troublemaker. He feigns a shuddering sob as her hand gently cups his shoulder, and then a real one comes when she tells him that it’s okay. That everything he feels is okay.

“It’s alright to grieve, Eli,” she tells him, and he slowly stands up, conscious of the files he has tucked away. “I know Lilly was important to you. I know you feel as if your emotions have been discounted in the past several months since - but I’m here for you, whatever you need. Whenever you need to talk.”

“Lilly”, he rasps, “she was someone I could have loved, you know? And she felt it too. I know she did.”

It’s the truth and not the truth at the same time; and just like with the sheriff, it works better that way. Ms. James guides him back to the chair and Weevil slides the files out of his jacket and into his bag as she walks back to the other side of the desk.

“Do you have anyone else you can talk to about this? Have you talked to anyone?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “Uh, Felix. Toombs. He’s real close. And, uh, Veronica.” Ms. James looks startled at that, so he continues on. “She’s - you know, I never really paid attention to her when Lilly was around. It’s like, Lilly was the only thing in the room.”

“You talk to Veronica Mars about Lilly?”

Weevil shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, we talk about other stuff too. But she needed someone. And I did too. It wasn’t like I sought her out or anything. We just ended up in the same place at the same time.”

“But she talks to you. About Lilly.”

“Yeah.” It’s starting to feel like he’s missing something, something big. Like he’s betrayed Veronica just by opening his mouth.

Ms. James looks purposefully casual, and that immediately sets off all sorts of warning bells. “Can you tell me what she says?”

“I think that’s between her and me.”

She looks chagrined, and for a moment, Weevil considers giving in. But then Ms. James gives a tight smile and moves on.

When his session is over, Veronica is waiting across the hall. He nods at her, and she slides along side him as they travel down the hallway together. And when he slips her Kane’s file, he’s careful to make sure she doesn’t catch sight of her own. 

~~~

Weevil pulls it out after his day is done, and it’s an interesting read - from her early days as a brown noser to her more colorful pages when she was with Echolls and Lilly and Kane. He doesn’t wonder why he never heard of any trouble the four of them. With two sets of parents rich and powerful, of course most of their pranks were swept under the rug. 

And then, the later pages.

“Socially isolated.”

“Withdrawn.”

Lists of tardies, complaints of sleeping in class. He gets to the report of how she ended up in detention with him, and laughs.

He finds the notes from the few sessions Veronica did show up for, the notes about her relationship with Echolls and Lilly. 

He gets to the part where Ms. James notes how Veronica still speaks of Lilly and Logan as if they are still here. Sees the follow up notes on how that could mean she’s not accepting their deaths.

After that, the notes are filled with her absences from the sessions.

He had been hoping the file would fill in some blanks, maybe give him an adult’s reading of the situation. Maybe offer some insight he doesn’t have or hasn’t been able to get. But it’s nothing he doesn’t already know, and he knows a lot more than she’s allowed anyone else to find out. If nothing else, he’s got that on his side.

~~~

Felix pulls him away from their lunch table when he’s waiting for her, agitated and angry, and demands to know where Veronica is.

“Dunno,” he says. “It’s not like I keep a lojack on her or something.”

His right hand man doesn’t crack a smile. Just stares at him, hard and long. “When you going to learn your lesson about white girls, cholo?”

He grits his teeth. “Veronica’s different.”

Felix gives a bark of laughter back. “Oh, yeah, she’s a whole other breed of person. It’s not like she promised you she wasn’t going to go back to her boy and then left you in the dust. Because she didn’t even have the courtesy to tell you that much.”

There are days he regrets spilling his gut to Felix, to telling him about the ups and downs of the Lilly fiasco, and today is shaping up to be one of them. “What the fuck are you on about?”

Felix shrugs, but his eyes are hard and his mouth is pressed into a little line. “Just that I saw your girl talking to her ex. They looked cosy. And it’s not like she’s made it clear you’re anything but what you are. I mean, man, how many times are you gonna let her run around on you? Fuck it. Fuck her. Just, don’t be doing this over a girl who is just in it for the thrill.”

Weevil grits his teeth. “You saw her talking to Kane?”

“Yeah, dawg. She was looking real friendly. And I know you like her, but she’s not worth it. I mean, people, they’re talking. And it ain’t good, what they’re saying.”

He sees her coming up to them, and she looks as innocent as the day is long, and he thinks to files stolen for her and the chaste kisses he gets in return. When she sees Felix with him, she scowls, and he grabs at her arm to pull her away. He hears her half-hearted sigh, and it just twists at him all the more.

“Want to tell me what’s up with you and Kane? Huh? Or are you just going to string me along while you’re working that angle?” He watches her mouth pout, her arms cross.

“I don’t know what you’re problem is. You know why I’m talking to Duncan. You know I’m not going to do anything behind your back. You know that he wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole.”

It’s like he’s been kicked in the gut. Kane wouldn’t touch her. Not that she wouldn’t touch him. Not that she doesn’t want to touch him. Not that she’s over him. He wants to know what it is about the Kanes that they can keep people like him and her tethered so tightly to them after all the shit they’ve pulled. 

“Yeah. That’s the problem. I know he won’t touch you. But you touching him? Not so clear on whether or not that’s still a possibility.”

He says it, even though he’s not sure it’s true. Kane looks at her like she’s an oasis, like he’d like nothing more than to take her back. Weevil doesn’t know why he doesn’t, even though he’s thrilled to death that he hasn’t. But he’s not dumb enough to tell Veronica any of that, especially when she’s stopped looking at him like he kicked her dog and instead is staring at him like she gets it.

“I’m with you,” she says, and she says it breathily. Not weakly, not like an excuse, but like it was something done and settled and she can’t believe they’re talking about it. He can’t believe it’s that easy.

“Are you?”

He watches her eyes water, watches her blink them back as she asks, shakily, “Aren’t I?”

It’s like he’s floating. It’s what he imagines being on a hot air balloon feels like, hearing her say that. He presses on, because he wants the whole deal. Doesn’t just want it to be assumed. “We never said anything official.”

“I didn’t know we had to,” she answers, apologetic, and he feels stupid for ever getting so mad at her in the first place, and feels stupider for wanting to let himself get carried off in this. For wanting to believe her.

“I don’t know. I just - usually if a girl’s serious about me, it’s more than some kisses, you know?” He can’t look at her straight on when he tells her that, because even though he’s not really saying what he should be saying, it feels like she might get what he’s saying anyway.

“I - I’ve never -”

It’s a revelation, that. Here he was, thinking she was going to lead him by the balls until she was done playing her games, and it’s something else entirely. He’s an asshole, but at least now he’s a happy asshole because Veronica is his and the only reason she’s shy is because she is.

“Oh.” He can feel his stupid grin spreading out across his face, and he wonders what it is about Veronica Mars that can make this part of him come out in full force as often as it does when she’s around. “Oh. Okay. So kisses.”

“Yeah.” She blushes again, and he pulls her in close to him, revels in the feel of her. He’s ready for this to be done. Doesn’t need more of an explanation than what she’s already given him, but she continues on. “I’m not - I don’t know how -”

He shushes her, because it shouldn’t be on her that he was an idiot. “We’ll figure it out.”

And when he kisses her, he lets himself feel like he’s flying. When he kisses her, he lets go of the ground.

~~~

She comes to him, grinning mischievously, and he doesn’t stop to think about the hows or whys of it until they’re off and out of school, flying toward the beach on his bike. He feels her clinging to his back, and the warm spot she creates radiates through him. 

When they get to Dog Beach, he lifts her off the motorcycle. Twirls her around just to hear her giggle. She does, light and airy. He imagines that in another life, in another world, she’s some sort of fairy. She’s tiny enough to be one, and fiery enough to be one. Tinkerbell, but better.

He lays out his jacket on the sand, and then lays her down on top of it before following himself. He goes down slowly, carefully, gently. Keeps his lower half as far away from her lower half as he can manage, because he can see this going too far, too fast, too publically. And she’s not that girl. 

Weevil kisses her, soft and slow, and revels in the taste of her. In the feel of her. Loses all sense of time or any other purpose than this one. After a while, he feels, rather than hears, her whine as she jostles them both to create friction. He laughs into her mouth in response, and moves even slower. Adds sliding the hands that have been tangled in her hair to drive her even more crazy. Slides them up and down her body, teasing the skin where her shirt doesn’t meet her pants. 

He pulls away, a little, and laughs as she attempts to recapture his lips with her own. It isn’t that he isn’t enjoying this, because he is. But she’s still virginal white, and skipping isn’t her scene. So he asks her.

“This is fun, too, right?”

Her lips are swollen and her eyes are heavy and he’s warm all over, because this is more than fun. He nips at her throat and the keening sound she makes goes straight to his dick. “Oh, yeah, this is fun.”

But he only wants this kind of fun with her when this kind of fun is the whole of the reason. And today, there’s something else here with them. He pulls back some more, inviting her to let him in. 

“I was asking about Duncan this morning. I figured, you didn’t need to be there when the rumors got new juice.”

“Just about Lilly, right?”

She scowls at him, and he has no idea why until she answers, “Yeah. About Logan and Lilly.”

The way she emphasizes Echolls’ name makes him scowl right back at her. “What is it about skinny white boys that revs your engine?” 

He spits it out at her, desperate to know why she’s so wrapped up in a guy who was just a raging asshole, and then immediately feels like shit when her face collapses. Her lip starts going at it, and her eyes fill with tears and he can tell she’s barely holding it together.

“Logan was one of my best friends,” she bites out. “He took care of me, and he loved me, and he asked me all the right questions, and he got it when I didn’t want to go home. He was there when I needed him. And now he’s not. And I’m not saying he was a better friend than Lilly and I’m not saying I love him more than Lilly. But Logan was my friend. And it’s horrible that you can only remember that she died, when he means something too.”

She stalks away from him then, down the rest of the beach, and he pushes himself up off the sand. Marches back up to his bike and takes off. Tries not to think that he left her, stranded, and just holds on to all the anger he feels toward her for this whole thing.

What he does try to do is fight back the sickening envy he feels. He wants to know the right questions to ask, and he wants to know why she didn’t want to go home. He wants all of that, and she won’t give it to him.

He feels dumb, really dumb, for being so jealous of a dead guy. He doesn’t want to let it bother him, that he’s competing with a ghost. It does, though, because this ghost isn’t metaphorical. He’s actually still here, and talking to the girl, and Weevil doesn’t want to chase after her. He’s done chasing after her, he decides. She can come to him.

This resolution lasts until morning, when the guilt creeps in and he wants to kick himself for being an ass. He lost Lilly, and it kills him. He can’t begin to think how it must feel for her, losing both of them. Caring for both of them. The selfish part of him wants to demand that she stop, that she give up Echolls. But, he gets it. He’s pretty sure he was in love with Lilly before her, and he’s sure there’s a bit of him that’s always going to wonder what if. He can’t begrudge her for the same, especially since Echolls is still around. He can’t expect her to give him up, when he can’t even hear Lilly and won’t let her go.

Weevil groans out loud, rolls over, and pulls on some clothes before kissing his abuela on the cheek.

“Where are you off to so early, mi hijo?” 

He shrugs, leans on the counter. “If you don’t need any help with the kids, I was gonna go see a girl.”

“Get your elbows off of there, Eli. A girl, eh? Well, I don’t need your help this morning.” She smiles at him, hugs him tight.

And he heads over to the Mars’ apartment, greeted at the door by the ex-sheriff in a ratty robe. Who arches an eyebrow at him quizzically.

“Eli Navarro,” he drawls out. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Uh, is Veronica here?” He saw this going a little differently in his head, and he wouldn’t be lying if he said he expected there being some kind of gun being brandished around him. The sheriff being perplexed throws him off his game more than a little.

“Well, she does live here,” her father allows. “But -”

He doesn’t say anything else, and as they stand there, staring at each other, it slowly dawns on Weevil that the sheriff doesn’t know he exists. Obviously, he knows he exists. Arrested him enough times to know that much. But Veronica’s kept her dad out of the loop regarding them, and that’s something he thinks he should have seen coming but didn’t. 

He ducks his head, and barely keeps himself from turning tail and running. “Can I -?”

The sheriff seems to be catching up, and he looks both concerned and a bit amused. But mostly concerned. “Yes, of course, Eli. Come on in.”

They end up sitting on a worn couch, and he has no idea what to say. He’s never done this before, picked a girl up at her house, not for a date but just because. And he’s never really been a proper boyfriend before. He’s hung out with girls and he’s made eyes at girls and he’s had girls make eyes at him. But this is something new.

The sheriff clears his throat. “I was about to get myself some breakfast. Would you -”

“No,” he says quickly. “Sir.”

Sheriff nods at him, but doesn’t move. They stay like that, both staring at the other, until Veronica wanders on out.

The first thing he notices is that she almost completely fails to notice him. The second thing is that she looks extremely cute in her pjs, making his position on her couch next to her father even more uncomfortable than before. When she does see him, she blinks a couple of times, and he decides this is the moment.

“Hey, I just. I wanted to apologize. Maybe take you to school.” He had wanted to apologize, back when he wasn’t mad at her. Back when he didn’t realize that he was just another girl’s dirty little secret. Now, he’s not sure what he wants to do. 

He watches her eyes shift from him to her father. Watches her face get the smallest of flushes. And his tamped down rage flares up again. “Okay. I’m going to get ready then.”

That’s it. That’s all he gets before she turns and leaves the room, the Sheriff hot on her heels. And he gets to hear the muffled sounds of conversation through her bedroom door, all the while wondering why he thought this was a good idea. All the while wondering why he scoffed at Felix, when Felix obviously knew better than he did, because he’s just dumb enough to think the blonde girls like him.

The Sheriff putters on back, nods at him, and sinks down into the couch. “She wants me to be nice to you,” he tells Weevil. He nods. They sit in not quite companionable silence, waiting for the girl in question to make her appearance. She skids out of her bedroom, looking embarrassed and uncomfortable, and all his muscles tighten in response. She doesn’t want him here, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing besides.

“You should come to get her more often, Eli. She’s ready in record time.”

He watches her turn and glare at her father as she gives him a soft and quick kiss and grabbing his hand, holding it tightly. “We’re going. Have a great day tracking wayward spouses.”

“Will do, honey. I expect you in the office promptly after school. We’re not done talking about this.”

“Oh, I think we are.”

It should make him feel better, that Veronica is willing to shut him down so quickly and so fast when it comes to him. When it comes to them. But it doesn’t.

He follows her out, but doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t look at her as she swings herself onto the bike, doesn’t look at her when he hands her the helmet. Doesn’t look at her as he asks, “I guess you never got around to telling him about me, huh?”

He climbs onto the bike without waiting for an answer, and he can feel her nuzzling into his back. Hears the soft, “yeah” she offers in response. 

“Look forward to talking about that, too, along with what you and your dad are going to be discussing,” he tells her. Why, he doesn’t know. He’s sick and tired of getting kicked in the teeth, is what he is, and he’s not going to give in to her this time. Not for all the head tilts and hair flips in the world.

They’re lucky he knows the town like the back of his hand. They’re lucky everyone else is paying attention to the road. Because he’s lost in the swirl of emotions he got caught in when her father opened the door. He can’t see anything other than piles of blonde hair, and giggles that echo as they peel away from him. Parks the bike, distangles himself from Veronica, and starts putting distance between the two of them. She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care how badly he’s aching because the only thing she offers up is an, “I’m sorry.”

He stops, and his jaw tightens. He tightens it to keep himself from doing something stupid, like crying. “Yeah.”

He walks away. She trots quickly after him. “I wasn’t trying to hide it, I swear.”

He turns, licks his lips. “Yeah? From what I can tell, you two are still in the running for the most sickeningly sweet father-daughter team. So, forgive me for thinking that a lot of things of lesser importance have made their way to him over the past, I don’t know, six or so weeks.” 

Her shoulders hunch, and her eyes get impossibly big, and he wonders how many guys she’s gotten to do every last little bit of her bidding with just those two weapons alone. How stupid he was to listen to her when she told him that there was no one else. How much of an jerk off he was to believe he was special to her. 

“I just - I didn’t know how to tell him.”

“I got that. I just don’t get why. Actually,” he continues, cutting off whatever it was she was preparing to say in an effort to explain everything away, “I get the why pretty good too. I mean, I’d be an idiot not to. Of course, an argument could be made that running around with two pretty white girls who are ashamed of me is pretty good proof that I am one. But what I really don’t get is why you get so bent out of shape about Lilly and what she was to me, when I’m the one begging for scraps here.”

He wants something. He wants her to say something to him, that actually addresses what he’s saying as opposed to what she’s feeling. She doesn’t say anything.

He saw that coming, so it shouldn’t hurt the way it does. But it feels like the back of his throat is on fire, like his skin is being pricked all over. What he did with Lilly was to stay close. To try and make her love him. To try and make her acknowledge that they had something, that they were something. He can’t do that again. He can’t give all that to Veronica and not get anything back. So he walks away, leaving her there in the dust.

~~~

By fourth period, he’s calmed down enough to work on the car he and the other guys in the gang are rebuilding, and he lets this place where he’s king sooth him and lull him into a state of relative relaxation. Fixing things, building things, knowing how to make something better, this is where he comes alive. He refuses to let the rest of his fucked up life intrude here, where he can make something out of almost nothing.

The rest of his fucked up life refuses to stay away, though, because tiny feet come walking into his peripheral vision. And the owner of those feet announces, “I’m not ashamed of you.”

His serenity shatters, and he barely gives her a glance. “Right. You routinely don’t tell your dad shit about your life. I remember that about you now.”

“There’s a lot I haven’t been telling my dad,” Veronica retorts, and he moves away from the car parts to avoid fixing things angry. “I don’t tell him about the 09ers. I don’t tell him about the crap I’ve been dealing with from them. I don’t tell him I’m investigating Logan and Lilly’s murders. And I didn’t tell him about you. But that doesn’t mean you’re not important to me. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you.”

“How long did you wait to tell the Sheriff about Duncan, huh?” He finally turns and looks at her fully, picking up a rag to wipe away the grease coating his skin. And as pissed as he is at her, he gets a little tendril of pleasure from watching her eyes focus on his arms before she puffs back up.

“That was different. He came to the house to pick me up for real, actual dates. We make out in corners and at the beach.” Her jaw is set, and he marvels at the idea that she thinks she’s the one in the right.

“I guess I’ll start picking you up from the house from now on before we do that then,” he snarks.

“What do you want from me?”

He watches her arms go up, and hears the exasperation in her voice, and just wants to shake her. “What do I want? I want for you to treat me like I’m your boyfriend, and not like I’m some dumb wetback you dick around with to pass the time until the in crowd wants you back. I’m not looking for another Lilly Kane, Veronica. Hiding in the shadows isn’t my thing.”

“I do that!” she exclaims, her voice loud and high, and he shushes her. “I’m with you, out in the open, at school. Every day. I eat lunch with you even though your gang makes it clear I’m not welcome there, and I go along with it when you talk about crap that I know is illegal. I told my dad you’re my boyfriend, okay? I don’t know what else you want from me.”

He hates moments like this, when he’s the dick for assuming they could never be anything, instead of having her be the bitch who gave him hope they could be before ripping it away. And he loves moments like this, when she’s telling him how it is and it’s nothing he could have ever expected. “So, I’m your boyfriend, then?”

He watches her mouth thin and her eyes tighten. “I thought so. But then again, I’ve thought so for weeks.” 

“Didn’t hear you tell anyone that, is all.” His smile gets a little bigger.

“Who around here do I talk to, vato? No one. Do you want me to walk up to Meg and just randomly update her on my life? Newsflash, they don’t care. You’re the only one here who cares, and I thought you already knew.”

She’s her cutest, Weevil decides, when she’s indignant, when she’s looking at him like he’s the problem. Like he’s unknowable. Playfulness courses through him, and he gazes at her from under his lashes, and smiles as he wipes the grease from between his fingers. “Alright.”

If anything, this seems to make her even madder, and he can’t stop the grin that bursts forth from his smile when she says, “And if you think you can just peel off whenever you’re pissed at me, just know that you can’t!”

He moves closer. “Alright.”

Her eyes narrow into slits and she opens her mouth, and he can see the stern lecture coming, about trust and how he doesn’t talk to her before assuming the worst. But he gets it now. So he kisses her instead, swallowing down the lines of recrimination she was prepared to fire at him. Pulls her to him tight, and she grinds into him in return. He wants her more than anything in this world. Slides his hands over her, and then under her shirt, up her back. It would be so easy to push her against a wall, to get her pants and his off. He can see it happening. He wants it to happen.

Veronica pulls away from his mouth, just a little, to tell him, “Weevil. We’re in school.” 

And there it is, the reason he’s not going to let this happen. Because she’s still Veronica, and she deserves better than the wall in auto shop. She deserves better than anything he can offer, but he can at least offer better than this.

“Yeah,” he breathes out. “We should take this somewhere else.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh.”

“If you want to,” he follows up. He doesn’t let go. “We don’t have to if you -”

“No,” she tells him. “I want to. I just - if I say stop -”

“We stop.” He runs his hands up her thighs, and imagines taking her jeans off of her. Imagines doing this again without the barrier. “The second you want to, we stop.”

He presses himself full against her, and she whimpers again. “So, we’re going?”

“Yeah,” he growls, enveloping her, sucking at the sensitive patch of skin right under her ear. “We’re going.”

He spins her around, holds her close to him, nips and laps at her neck, breathes on the wetness he’s left, and revels in her shivers. She’s claimed him, and he’s taking that euphoria and claiming her right back. She grinds into him, and he swallows a moan. “Don’t do that. Not unless you want this trip to end inside a classroom.”

She startles, and tries to scamper away. He won’t let her. “Don’t do that either,” he chuckles. “Just stay right here with me. Just stay right here.”

She nestles back into his arms, and he buries his face in her hair, breathing her in, as they slowly and unstealthily make their way out of the school building. He doesn’t want to, but he has to, release her in order to do the drive home. She pushes into his back, and he drives as fast as he can without either losing control or getting pulled over. 

He takes her to the barrio. To his house. Slides her off the bike and into his arms. Lifts her up as he manages the steps. Unlocks the door, and then stumbles toward his room, battling her tongue the entire way. Walks her backwards to the bed, and pushes her gently onto it. He breathes deep, and leans back.

“I want to see you,” Weevil croaks out. “Can I see you?”

She gets what he’s saying, if her blush means anything, and nods to him. Gives her a quick kiss, and gets started.

He undresses her slowly, takes his time. Checks in with her, makes sure she’s good with where this is going, how this is going. She doesn’t hide from him, just matches him kiss for languid kiss. She tries to take his shirt off, but this isn’t that time. He just wants to see her. He wants to focus everything on her. On making this good for her. 

She’s gorgeous when she flies apart, when she’s dancing on his fingers, and he wants to know how the hell Kane gave her up. How in the hell none of them saw how beautiful she is, before. How none of them saw her, before. 

“What about you?” Veronica asks after she comes back to herself; stares up at him, all earnestness and guilelessness, and he hates himself for thinking anything other than what she’s telling him, hates himself for thinking that she was just playing games, hates that he thought she would do something to hurt him just to hurt him. Like Lilly had.

Lilly, who walked down the hall arm in arm with Echolls, days after he’d poured out his heart to her. Who’d joked with Veronica as the little pixie of a girl he hadn’t known at the time found herself tucked under Echolls’ other arm. Who’d searched him out in the hallway, who’d smirked at him after she met his eyes. Who’d twirled away from Echolls and him at the same time, leaving Echolls laughing and him struggling not to break down.

It’s something he’s thought about, a lot, since Veronica told him Logan wouldn’t have hit Lilly. He believes her, even if he doesn’t really want to. Because he’s seen women who’ve been hit go back, again and again. He understands that. He understands it, even as he hates it, and it was something he thought he could save her from. Lilly being Lilly, being Lilly to him, isn’t something that he can shield himself from. It cuts deep, that he was just something she had and then moved on from.

Veronica isn’t Lilly. It’s something he knows. But he’s looked at her, and he’s wondered what she’s doing with him. Why she’s with him. Why she bothers. And now he knows. It’s because she’s not Lilly. And that’s all he needs to know about it. So, he just pulls her closer, kisses her head, and tells her, “Baby, that was for me. But, if you don’t think so, just think of it as my atonement.”

“For what?” she asks as squishes into him and twists in an effort to present him her face. He kisses her in return.

“For forgetting.”

Her forehead crinkles, because she doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t bother to explain it. Just rolls on top of her in his bed and kisses her again.

He had Lilly here, once. And the entire time, he was afraid something would happen that would shatter the moment. That she’d hear something or see something and wake up to the reality that this wasn’t her life and he wasn’t the guy she wanted as a boyfriend. He doesn’t have that worry now.

~~~

Weevil spends his afternoon working on his bike and riding with the boys, revving their engines near old ladies in the 09 zip and then speeding off, cackling all the way. More than most things, he likes the silly moments being with the gang can call up, when their pranks are more pint sized than aspirational. When scaring the old people who think that just because they’re brown, they’re criminal is the whole game. 

He spends his afternoon doing that, but there’s a constant buzzing that he dropped his girlfriend off at her disapproving father’s office, later than he should have. So, when Veronica calls, he’s half expecting her to say something other than what she does.

What she does say is that she wants him to give her a ride back to the office.

“What about your car?”

He can practically visualize the head tilt she’s working. “I kind of told him we were going to go on a date?”

He groans. “You’re lying to the sheriff.”

“Two things: he’s my dad, so it’s expected. And if you come with me, it’s not technically a lie. It’s just a very specific kind of date that most sixteen year olds wouldn’t come up with.”

“Breaking and entering is exactly the kind of ‘date’ a lot of the sixteen year olds I run with would come up with,” he snarks back, and she huffs in return.

“I have a key. It’s not anything major. I just thought that we could spend some more time together.”

She sounds wistful, which is the only reason he gives in.

They’re at the office with no place for him to run when she drops the bigger bomb. “My dad wants you to come over for dinner on Friday.”

The world narrows. “What do you mean, dinner?”

“It’s usually the third meal of the day. Typically a larger one than the two that precede it.” 

Usually, he likes it when she snarks at him. When she shows off her harder edges. But not now, not like this. So he nudges her as she sifts through the safe, and asks, “Don’t be a smart ass. What does he want from me?”

She doesn’t bother looking back at him, and just continues to flip through some of the files. “He wants you to prove that me dating you isn’t evidence that I should be institutionalized.”

“Yeah, okay,” he starts to say, but Veronica is gone again before he can finish.

“He made a copy...”

“Copy of what?” She doesn’t answer, so he tries again. “Copy of what?”

It grates on him, it does, the way she takes what she needs from him and doesn’t give him an explanation for why. Doesn’t bother to tell him what she’s found. So he pulls at the file, and she snaps back into the present.

“It’s Lilly and Logan’s file. It’s the work he did on the case before he got recalled.” She lets him keep it in his hands, but starts flipping through. Weevil reels back when she gets to the first picture. 

It’s of Lilly, and Echolls. Echolls is missing half of his fucking face, and his body looks broken. Lilly, though, his Lilly, has a bashed in skull, all bloody, and her eyes are just - his stomach almost rebels at it. At seeing her.

“Damn,” he swears. Stares at Veronica in disbelief. “How can you stand to look at that?”

“I saw it first hand,” she mutters. “I saw them myself. Nothing’s as bad as that.”

It’s something he really has never thought about, he figures, as she starts making a copy of the file. She was there. She saw them, in the flesh. And now she sees them not in the flesh. He fights back the urge to pity her. He embraces the awe he feels for her instead.

She works meticulously, and he can’t help but think that if she had gone as crazy as everyone at school says she is, she would have the perfect reason. But she stayed pretty sane, for all the murder and the ostracism and the ghosts. She’s stayed pretty sane for knowing the wrong guy is in jail and the real killer is still out walking around. 

He doesn’t think he would have been able to do it. To be this strong. 

“We can go now.” She says it quietly, and he nods, too caught up in his own head, too caught up in having that image of Lilly burned into his brain, too caught up in imagining her stumbling upon them, her reaction to them laying there, to say anything to her at all.

He feels her slide onto the bike behind him, and he starts off. He should bring her home, but he can’t let her go when those are the only thoughts he has swimming about in his head. When he’s wondering if that’s when her ghosts showed up for her. When he’s wondering if that’s why her ghosts showed up for her.

So he just drives the highway, lets his bike and the asphalt take away as much of his turmoil as they can. And they do a lot of good. Almost as much as the girl clinging to his back. When he sees the pull off point, he’s ready.

It’s exactly what he needs, dark and empty, and he holds Veronica’s hand as he meanders along the edge. He can hear the waves crashing below, and it soothes him even as it leaves him melancholy. Sits on a rock, and Veronica just stands beside him.

“I couldn’t go to the wake,” he tells her. “And I stayed away from that video that went out of them. I never saw her like that before.”

“The wake was closed casket,” she answers, and it sounds like every emotion has been banished from her voice. “No one saw her like that there.”

Weevil doesn’t look up at her. Can’t, if he wants to make it through this. “I guess what I’m saying is, it didn’t hit me, what you saw. Until today.”

“Think it explains something about me? Because it doesn’t. Okay?” Her voice is sharp, and it’s clear that she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand how much stronger than him she is. How the only thing seeing those pictures explains is how even Lilly Kane herself failed to recognize the exact level of amazing her best friend is.

He doesn’t know how to put that into words either. “I don’t need anything about you explained. This isn’t about that. It’s just - I’m sorry you had to go through that. Seeing them.”

He feels her sit beside him, her warmth seeping into his side. “In a way, I’m glad I did,” she whispers out to the water, and she sounds ethereal. “I wouldn’t have ever believed they were gone any other way.”

He wraps an arm around her waist, pulls her in tight to his side. Holds her there. It’s exactly what he needs.

~~~

On Friday, he frets. He’s never been one for suits and ties, even though he has enough so he isn’t wearing the same shirt and tie when it comes to the Holy Days, as well as normal Mass. He’s never comfortable in them, is the thing. It always feels like the him in a suit is someone else, someone who exists mostly on Sundays. And, now, when his girlfriend’s father demands he come to dinner.

Veronica also made it clear that showing up with the bike was going to be a bad call, so he pulled in a favor and ends up with a shitty Impala as his wheels for the night. He doesn’t think the thing is worth the amount of parts he’s going to be lifting in order to hold up his half of the bargain. But, as it turns out, what Veronica wants, Veronica gets. And Veronica wanted him in a car.

He drives over, respecting all speed zones because he doesn’t know exactly how hot the Impala is, and still makes it to the Mars’ new digs early. And when Veronica opens the door, her mouth drops open in a way that isn’t exactly flattering, to him or to her.

“Shut it,” he tells her uncomfortably, because the tie is cutting off his air and the button up makes him feel itchy, and the last thing he wants is to feel like a freak in a freak zoo.

“Eli Navarro, you sure do clean up nice.”

He glares at her half heartedly. “You said to. You said no leather. You said no bike. You said -”

“I know what I said,” she responds, and he watches her grin take over her face. “I just didn’t expect Weevil to become Eli.”

His glare hardens, and alarm bells start ringing. Bells that tell him this is the kind of guy she’s looking to date, instead of the kind of guy he is. “I’m still Weevil, baby. Don’t you forget it.”

“Of course you are,” she reassures him condescendingly, and he wants to bite her. “Where’d you get the sweet ride?”

“My uncle owns a chop shop,” he tells her bluntly. When she flinches at the whole ‘her boyfriend drove a probably stolen car to her ex-Sheriff father’s house’ thing, he grins nastily at her. “See, still Weevil. I just -” Loses the grin, and his confidence. “I wanted to do good by you.”

Her face crumples, and he watches as tears form, ready to drop. And he panics. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry. If this isn’t what you want -”

“This is exactly what I want,” she protests. “You’re exactly what I want. Thank you. For doing this. For wanting to do this.”

It takes him a second to realize where he’s seen that look before. It’s a look of adoration, and he quells under the strength of it. “Yeah. Well. Where’s your pops?”

She kisses him once, and then winds her fingers through his and tugs him toward the kitchen. 

“Ah, Eli,” the sheriff greets, “you’re right on time.”

“Yeah, my grandmother made sure we all knew about punctuality.” He resists the urge to tug on his collar or shuffle his feet, or give in to any of the little ticks that could take the edge off his nervousness. 

“It’s a good life skill. Makes up for a lot of other faults.” Mr. Mars smiles encouragingly at him, and he gulps.

Yeah. That’s what she says.” He can’t help it, he gently raps his knuckles along the edge of the counter as the silence expands across the apartment.

It’s Veronica who breaks it by saying, ““So, we’re having chicken kiev tonight. I’m not sure it’s going to be any good, because this is the first attempt. So, it’s like a maiden voyage. With the food.”

The sheriff volleys back, “Are you saying we should have the pizza place as a back up?”

“No,” she responds. “I’m saying that pizza should have maybe been the first choice. But you insisted on home cooking that didn’t have an -aroni or orange cheese, so, this is what we’ve got.”

And Weevil lets himself fade back as they banter. It feels good, being here, seeing them. Watching Veronica come to life and be fully at ease with herself in a way he doesn’t normally get to. She’s more fully her around her father, and he admires the man for doing that for her. For being there for her in the way she needs. Plus, it offers him a little respite before he has to be a part of the conversation again. He hopes. 

It’s not to be, because the sheriff is determined to not let him off the hook that easily. 

“Excuse me if I want Eli to think I don’t feed you crap on most days of the week, even if that’s true. I want to make a good impression, you know.”

“Weevil already knows how we eat, Dad.”

“But he hasn’t seen it first hand. I want to keep it that way for the first meal or three.” Weevil chokes a bit on nothing, at the thought of getting into yet another button down and tie and doing this all over again, and Veronica and her father turn in unison to him.

“You okay?” she asks, and he nods at her, still not willing to speak.

“You didn’t think this was going to be a one time thing, did you? Because it would be bad for you if it were. I’d be transferring Veronica to Pan by morning.”

It’s the truth, he knows it’s the truth, and it doesn’t help his sudden complete dryness. “No, I didn’t. I just, could I have something to drink?”

“What were you looking to get?” Veronica’s dad sheds that skin, stops being the jovial dad type, and slides into being the sheriff. Weevil imagines this tactic works on a lot of people, worked on a lot of guys interested in Veronica. Except, he’s got a secret weapon here. And it’s that he’s faced this particular person on numerous occasions, starting from when he was twelve. The other guys, the other people in Veronica’s life, they might not know how to handle Sheriff Mars. But Weevil? This is his element. It’s the dad part he doesn’t have down.

“Water.” He refrains from offering up the ‘sir’ that clamors to follow, because he’s still who he is, and he respects the Sheriff, sure. But he’s not the type to offer that up without just cause. He watches the Sheriff smile, like he knows exactly what’s happening here. Weevil doesn’t doubt that he does; the man is smart enough.

“I’ll get you out the glass.” He turns and walks into the kitchen, continuing, “We only have tap. We were going to go fancy, but then Veronica reminded me we still have to make rent this month.”

He relaxes a bit more, and then tenses up again as Veronica leans against him and he pulls away. “Don’t. There’s gonna be space, alright?”

“You want to impress him,” she cheerfully tells him, and he thinks it’s a bit sick, how much pleasure she’s getting from this.

“I want to keep you,” he answers. “And if I gotta do this to get that, then this is what I’m doing.”

She darts in, presses a quick kiss to his cheek, and he blushes a bit at the contact. “Thank you.”

~~~

Hanging out with Veronica at her apartment has become a regular occurrence, and Weevil marvels at how much more sedate her life is than his. How her apartment is so much smaller than his house, but feels bigger from the absence of other people in it. 

It’s also funny that her father is more than happy to have him here when he’s out working the cases, given where they started out. But occasional bites to eat together and the fact that he doesn’t want Veronica alone any more than Weevil wants to leave her alone has given them a common interest.

Watching television, with Backup pressed into his side, he gives his girlfriend a sidelong glance as she buries herself deeper in the files she’s been going through compulsively since they stole them. 

He doesn’t know what she expects to discover this time around that she hasn’t in all of her other times, but he doesn’t fight her on it either. It isn’t worth it, he thinks, to argue with her over what has become her crusade. It isn’t worth it to try and convince her that she might not solve this mystery.

But, still, he’d prefer her here, with him, now. So that they’re actually hanging out, instead of him watching soccer with a dog and her being off in her own world without him. So he asks, “See anything interesting?”

She doesn’t look up, not that he really expected her to. “Only your alibi. And the e-mails you wrote to Lilly.” 

He groans, because of course the shit he never wanted her to see she’s got an all access pass to. It’s almost enough that he wants to tell the sheriff about the safe break, about how she’s got her hands on his file. Almost, but not quite. “They got those in there? Seriously?” 

“Seriously.”

She’s still not looking at him, and it hits him that there might be a whole other reason behind that than just her intense devotion to the case. “You okay with them?”

She finally looks up, and blinks at him in incomprehension. He watches her figure out what he means. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but right now, it’s just evidence. Everything is just evidence about Lilly and Logan, and later I’ll figure out how I feel about it.”

Her ability to separate herself from this case, to look at it like everyone involved isn’t someone she knows, to act like the people killed weren’t her people, it knocks him out.

She groans, and rolls her shoulders back. “I don’t know who I should have as suspects.”

“Who do you have now?” He leans over, hands her some popcorn, looks at her files again, the hard copy of her father’s and all the information she’s gathered and organized on her computer.

“The Casablancas brothers, the Kanes.” She darts her eyes to him, and he watches her flush. “You. The usual.”

“Me, huh?” He says it mostly to mess with her, to watch the pink spread across her skin, and she doesn’t disappoint.

“You’re cleared! You just - you were an original suspect, so, I just made a file for you too.”

“Anyone who was an original suspect not for you?” He looks down at her from his position on the couch.

“No.” She shakes her head, like there are pieces that need to come loose. “I’ve even got Koontz. You’re in good company.”

Weevil shifts, thinks about it all, Lilly and Logan and everything. There’s the strangest sensation coursing over him, like something is trying to lead him to an answer he just can’t see. Or, trying to lead her to an answer, and he’s just in the cosmic way. “You ever think that maybe you’re going in the wrong direction with this?”

Her face gets more intent, even as her eyes fade away. It’s like a mixture when she goes off with her ghosts, and when she’s so focused on something she goes somewhere else entirely. It scares him, how easily she can be lost. But she says, “What?”

So he answers. “I said, you ever think your theory about it being about Lilly and Logan is maybe off? That maybe it was just about Logan? Or Lilly? And the other one just happened to be there?”

It’s something he’s been thinking about, the idea that maybe one or the other got in too deep. It was probably Lilly, even though it hurts to even think it, because the deed went down at the Kane Estate. But if whoever who did the deed had been tracking Logan, Lilly could have gotten caught in the crossfire. He goes to explain that to her, but Veronica’s head is tilt toward nothingness, and her eyes are staring heavily at what seems to be an overabundance of Padres memorabilia. It takes him a second to get it, because it hasn’t happened around him for quite a while. But this is her when she’s with her ghosts. When she’s with Logan. 

“Weevil,” he hears her breathe, even though she’s still with Echolls, still staring at him like he hung the fucking moon, “we have to go to the Kane’s.”

It takes him so much by surprise he almost slips off the couch. “What? Why?”

Veronica’s still staring ahead, still separate from him, and he wants to rage against this guy - this dead asshole - who thinks he can just float on in and grab Veronica and take her where he wants to go. “I think I have an idea about why what happened happened, but I’m going to need to get into the Kane mansion in order to tell.”

“I’ll just break in there later tonight,” Weevil decides, desperate to break the connection between his girlfriend and her dead friend. “Lilly showed me how to.”

She shakes her head at him, but still doesn’t look at him. “No. No. It’s been months. Plus, Lilly and Logan died there. They’ve definitely heightened security. If you get caught, that’s the end of this. Plus, I don’t know exactly what to tell you to find. I have to go there.”

“But now?” It’s a bad idea. He knows it’s a bad idea. If she were thinking clearly, she would know it’s a bad idea.

But instead, she’s clutching her file to her chest and telling him, “Yes. Now. I need to go there now. I need to know.”

“There’s no way they’ll let you in.” 

“They’ll let me in. They have to.”

“I’m not going there,” he tells her, resolute in the face of her own resolve, and he expects her to argue more. Expects her come back to him and out of whatever hold Echolls and Lilly have on her. 

She doesn’t. She doesn’t even look back as she sprints out of the apartment, grabbing her keys on the way out. He sits there, stunned, and then he hears her car peeling away. Yells, “Veronica!” as he watches her speed off.

There have only been a few times in his life when Weevil has been completely lost, has had absolutely no idea what to do or what to make of the situation he’s found himself in. This is one of those times. He wanders back over to the couch, to Backup, who looks as concerned with this situation as anyone else. Pats the dog on the side for a second, and hopes beyond hope that Veronica is going to recognize this for the bad plan that it is and come on back.

He doesn’t want to drive up to the Kane mansion if she’s going to figure that out, so he stays put. And stays put. And then gives in to the fact that she isn’t going to come back, not without the answers to her questions.

He’s her back up. He’s all she has right now. The only actual living, breathing person who knows what kind of shit she’s been mucking around in. He has to go to her, has to be with her, in case this goes down the way he thinks it probably will.

So he grabs the spare key, puts away her computer, and walks out to his bike, cursing the fact that a tenacious blonde who doesn’t realize she weighs less than a feather has ensnared him so thoroughly as he rides up into the 90909 zip code to find her. Parks next to her car.

He gets to the door and steels his nerves, readies himself for when he knocks and is resoundingly turned away. But Veronica opens the door at that moment and almost falls into his arms. He grabs her to keep her from falling, and lets himself get angry.

“You go off on me for walking, and you’re running out all over town?”

She’s trembling, but she launches herself toward his lips, kisses him hard and burrows in for a second before pulling away. “I have to tell you something, but first I need you to do something for me, without asking questions, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

She kisses him again. “Take these to my dad. He’s at the office.”

The tapes weigh heavy in his hand, like he’s holding something with a value he doesn’t understand. “What are they?”

“It’s what got Lilly and Logan killed.”

He pulls her close. “If I’m running these to the Sheriff, what will you be doing?”

She trembles a little more, pulls away. “I have to check out a few things. A few loose ends.”

“Don’t you think you should have me with you for that?” 

He can hear her voice shaking as Veronica tells him, “I am trying really hard to keep it together here, so I’m going to need you to stop asking me questions and get these to my dad. Please.”

He looks at her, long and hard, and finally nods. “Alright. You okay?”

“No.” He stares at her, her eyes glowing in the light of the house. “But I think I will be.”

She kisses him once more, and he pockets the tapes and climbs onto his bike. Rides off down the drive and across town.

The tapes burn in his pocket, and he hates that he let her convince him to let her go. He hates that she needs to do these things by herself, when it wouldn’t cost her anything to let him go with her. But he rides on, partially because he has no idea where she would be going. And he doesn’t have the time to go chasing her down.

~~~

He makes it to Mars Investigations in record time. Bursts in like the hounds of hell are at his heels, and barely makes it in before the sheriff runs him down on his way out.

“Sheriff,” Weevil calls, and turns to run alongside him. Because only one thing could get this particular man this kind of worked up, and that’s Veronica.

“Duncan just called,” the man huffs out, yanking his car door open as Weevil clambors in the other side. “It was Aaron Echolls who killed Lilly and Logan. Veronica figured it out.” Weevil is cold all over. 

“But Aaron was there,” the sheriff continues, “and Veronica told Duncan to keep an eye on him. Duncan lost him. Called Veronica. And got disconnected,” he finishes grimly, driving well over the speed limit.

“Wait a minute - are you telling me Aaron Echolls has Veronica right now?”

“That’s our working theory,” Mr. Mars tells him, eyes set on the road. “Duncan thinks Veronica was headed to the Echolls home, so there’s really only one road she would take to get there. If he’s right, we’re in luck because it should be easier to find her than if she were headed anywhere else. I’ve activated the GPS in her phone anyway, but it’s good to have a heads up.”

He wishes he were on his bike, because he has the need to do something and all he can do is bounce his knee. “Why does she think it was Mr. Echolls?”

“Dunno, Duncan didn’t say. He was pretty panicked. Said it made sense.” There’s a pause, and he knows what’s coming. “Eli, was my daughter working on the Lilly Kane - Logan Echolls murder case for long?”

“As long as I’ve been talking to her,” he tells the sheriff truthfully.

“And you didn’t decide to mention that because -”

Weevil shrugs. “At first, it’s because she wasn’t getting her information from anything you would consider credible. And later, it’s because she told me not to.”

“If this relationship between us is going to work,” he offers sternly, “you have to keep me in the loop about things like this.”

“Honestly, Sheriff, I’m more concerned with your daughter and me than me and you.”

Veronica’s father doesn’t say anything else, just pushes even harder on the gas, and Weevil thinks they’re both dying in the car, cracking under the pressure of not knowing how or where Veronica is.

He looks out the window, and sees the LeBaron. Goes to point it out to the sheriff, when he realizes the other man is slowing the car down.

Right in time to hit Aaron Echolls with it. 

Weevil gasps, and throws himself backward into his seat. The Sheriff curses, gets tangled in his seat belt, curses again, and then falls out of his car. Weevil jumps out, too, in time to see Mr. Mars pull Aaron Echolls into a sitting position and slug him.

“Where is she? Where is she you son of a bitch? Where’s my daughter?”

He looks toward the trees, where the movie star obviously came from, and sees smoke and orange light pouring from within the woods.

“Better say your goodbyes, Keith,” Aaron jeers, and Weevil wonders exactly how evil this man really is. “Your daughter’s going to be fried pretty well before you ever find her.”

Sheriff doesn’t take too kindly to that, and punches the guy so hard his head bounces off the bumper and he slumps down, obviously unconscious.

They both look toward the woods, and run full speed into them. Toward the fire.

He loathes Veronica, a little, in this moment, as he tears through tree limbs and trips over roots, desperately searching for her in the night. He’s going to kill her when he finds her, he promises himself. He’s going to wring her neck and tell her that this shit, it’s got to stop. He doesn’t care who killed Lilly. This isn’t worth it. Not anymore.

And then, he swears he sees Echolls. In the distance, and not really clear, but he’s there for a flash. Weevil blinks, stops dead and stares, and watches as Echolls melts back into a fridge. A fridge that’s on fire.

And all he wants is to get to it before Veronica really is dead, and he doesn’t even joke in his head about killing her. Because he saw Echolls, and the only reason to see Echolls is if his girl is nearby. 

He saw Echolls.

It isn’t that he didn’t believe Veronica. It isn’t that he didn’t believe she saw ghosts, or even that she had them. He did. He believed it . But now, he knows. And knowing is a different sort of animal altogether. And as the Sheriff races by him to get to the fridge, as he gets pushed back out of the fire by the same guy as he struggles to get the door open, Weevil lets go of almost every bad thought he ever had about the guy. He keeps the ones about how Echolls was a dick to his grandmother - she’s his grandmother, after all, and the guy was a dick - but everything else, he just lets go. Because he doesn’t know what it must have taken for Echolls to do what he did - to save Veronica the way he did. But it couldn’t have been easy. And if Echolls loves Veronica enough for that, if Echolls is giving Veronica back to him, then the guy couldn’t be all bad.

Veronica slides out as the door opens, and she looks dead. His heart stops. But she gasps in some air, and opens her eyes, and she’s the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen in his life. 

They stare at each other, across the flames, before Veronica looks back at her father and gasps. Starts pulling the man away from the fire, and Weevil charges in to help. They get him away from the flames, and he watches as Veronica grabs a tarp and puts him out completely. The smell of charred clothes and flesh make him nauseous, make him woozy, but he keeps it together for Veronica. 

She turns to him, gasps out, “Aaron?”

“Hit him pretty hard, with a car.”

“Good,” she tells him, and then surprises him completely by passing out, leaving him with two unconscious people and a still on fire fridge.

~~~

Weevil had thought hell was the days and weeks after Lilly stopped talking to him, stopped seeing him, and started avoiding him. And then he thought hell was when she was dead, when he moved through every day with the knowledge that she wasn’t here anymore. But now, he knows different. This is hell, sitting here, in this room, waiting for Veronica to wake up. For the first six hours, he wasn’t even allowed near the room. Family only, they said. He’d pleaded, begged, cajoled, and would have threatened if he thought it would do any good. It was the sheriff who got him in, because of course it was. It was the sheriff who was laid up in his own bed, unable to journey down to see her himself, so Weevil became the emissary. And now, at hour 30, he has nothing more than he had to report at hour seven.

“Please, Veronica,” he whispers, “come back. They got each other. They don’t need you too.”

He tells her this, periodically. Hopes it gets through. Because the doctors may think it’s trauma that’s keeping her asleep, but he knows. They have her. And he’s not sure he’s going to get her back. Because she didn’t want to give them up before, and he can’t imagine that changing now. He can’t let her go, though. And he’s tired enough to think crawling into bed with her is a good idea.

~~~

He wakes up to a wiggle worm snuggling into him and then pushing him away, and he’s so tired that for a second he doesn’t know who it is or where he is. But he knows it has to stop, so he groans, “Stop moving.”

“You can’t be here,” Veronica hisses at him. “My dad’s going to kill you if he finds you here.”

It’s like liquid warmth has been poured into his blood, he’s so happy and so complete. He can’t help but tease her, even though he thinks her waking up is nothing short of a miracle. “And where do you think here is exactly?”

Watches her stop. Look around. “Why am I in the hospital?”

He stretches, curls an arm around her side and huddles into her, breathing her in. Feels charitable enough about this whole situation to say, “If I were a guy who kept score, I’d say it’s because you ignored my offer to come with you on your fact finding. But since I’m not, I’m just going to say that you had a pretty nasty blow to the head plus a lot of smoke inhalation. The docs wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Aaron,” she realizes. “He tried to kill me.”

“Yeah. He did. Almost succeeded, too.” He burrows further into her side. Grips her waist a little more. “Don’t be doing that again.”

“I’ll try not to,” she tells him dryly. She gently presses a kiss to the top of his head, and he holds in the contented sigh. “Where’s my dad?”

He tenses, and tightens his grip on her, willing away the images of her trapped in a refrigerator. “What do you remember?”

“Logan,” she replies. “And Lilly. And heat. But not much else.”

“Okay, so, we got a call from Kane - your dad did, anyway - saying he lost Echolls and that you hung up on him. And we went to go find you. We found the cars pretty quickly, mostly because the bastard ran out into the road. Your dad hit him.” She gasps and he chuckles. “Yeah, sheriff’s a bad ass. Anyway, there’s a lot of smoke and shit coming up through the trees, and Aaron just sort of smiles and tells your dad to say goodbye. He dove through the fire and got you out of that fridge. But he got kinda burned doing it.”

“Is he okay?” She tears up and he tenderly wipes them away.

“Yeah. I think so. A little burned and a little bruised, but the docs seem to think he’ll recover fine.” He pauses, and once again battles back all his fears. “You’re the one they were worried about. You wouldn’t wake up.”

She shifts a little, and he waits for her to slip away. She doesn’t. “I was with Logan and Lilly.”

“Yeah?” He knew it, and he hates it. Hates that he’s going to have to be supportive of this. “How’d that go?”

“I think they’re gone.” She starts to cry. “I think they left me.”

Weevil presses closer to her, hugs her to him. And silently thanks them. Thanks them for not being selfish assholes. For knowing enough to let her go. For not continually dragging her into their world.

He never knew Echolls, and he knew Lilly only too briefly. But he really didn’t think they’d have it in them to give her up. He didn’t think either one of them would be strong enough to make the hard choice. He feels a little guilty over that, especially after seeing Echolls do his thing to get them to the fridge. But he didn’t, and he’s more than pleasantly surprised they’ve proven him wrong. Even if it hurts his girl in the short term.

~~~

“Home, sweet home,” Weevil intones, and he opens up the apartment door for her. It’s true for her as well as for him, because any moment not spent with her or the sheriff at the hospital had pretty much been spent here instead.

He watches her flop onto her couch. Watches as she is greeted enthusiastically by an overprotective, over exuberant pit bull. “Oh, this is amazing. Three days in the hospital is two and a half too many.”

“And you were out completely for a day and a half,” Weevil tells her fondly. “Imagine what the Sheriff is going through.”

“Him? I don’t worry about him. Cute nurses flirting, all the jello he can eat, he’s golden. I’m the one with the obviously badass boyfriend who glared at every doctor who smiled at me.”

He scowls at her, flops down next to her. “Yeah? That one guy kept coming back.”

“To check my charts!” She pushes him with her feet, and he grabs one and starts massaging it. “You psycho! He was making sure I was getting better.”

“He was checking something out, I’ll give it to you,” Weevil tells her, his jealousy flaring again.

She rolls her eyes at him. And then just looks at him. He shifts uncomfortably as the mood of the room switches to serious. “Hey, thanks. For everything. For taking care of Backup, for being there for me. Just, thanks.”

“Yeah, well. It was nothing.” In the grand scheme of everything, what he did was nothing. She saved the day, got the bad guy, and solved the crimes. Her dad saved her. He was just the guy along for the ride. 

“It wasn’t,” she says, and pushes herself up and sitting, her eyes shining with sincerity. “You did so much, have done so much, and I just - I want to make sure you know that I know.”

“I know.” 

She crawls toward him and he hardens at the visual, hardens more as she kisses him. He tastes her, the her with the somewhat baking soda tasting hospital toothpaste. It makes him want her more, and he curls an arm around her and kisses her back, deep and hot and demanding. She slips into his lap. He smiles into it. Pulls away. “Hey.”

“Hi.” She slides her hands up his arms, leaving him tingling. “So, I was thinking.”

“Uh huh.” He presses kisses into her neck.

“How would you feel about taking this to the bedroom?” He pulls away, looks at her, all nervous energy.

“You sure?”

“Yes.” She presses a kiss to his mouth. He believes her. “I want this. I want to start really living. And I want it to be with you.”

He grins at her. “Only me?”

She slides his shirt off, tugs at the wife beater. He lets her do it. “Only you.”

His smile slides from cocky to affectionate. “Alright.” Presses kisses to her again and again, enough contact with her skin to make his blood boil as it pumps through him. 

He slides her up, holds her close as he carries her to her room, eyes closed the whole way. Slides his tongue into her mouth, coaxes hers into his. Kneels before her bed and gently slides her on. Kisses her stomach, and she giggles and pulls him up her body. He feels on fire as she runs her fingers up and down his chest as they kiss and kiss and kiss more. Feels on fire when he gets to that sensitive part on her neck and she gasps, digging her nails into his arms. He pulls away from her long enough to get her shirt off, and she grasps at his belt and tries to disentangle it. 

“Hey,” Weevil asks, “you okay?”

She kisses him deep, and unbuttons his pants. “Me? I’m fabulous.”

She is, he thinks. She’s perfect.

He starts planning out his next tattoo. It’s going to be all her, something that is just her, curled around his heart.


End file.
